Facades
by Sifl-senpai
Summary: "Granny," he asked an old woman, once, "why do you wear masks?" The question seemed so important at the time, back before he realized that it would always be his own face beneath the mask no matter how often he covered it. (Experimental, introspective piece about Termina's lore and what it means for Link as a character. Covers Anju/Kafei sidequest extensively.)
1. Facades

The ritual consumed him.

Days one, two, and three, followed by a gauntlet of hour after hour of complete and utter solitude beneath a red sky and a sun that would never rise. Then, he'd play a threnody, and the clocks turned back to the beginning to start the days over again.

He found that he liked the control. He knew this place, and he knew these people, even if where they came from in the great span of time _before_ the three days, and where they were going once the impossible _after_ came to pass was a mystery. He could fit in wearing the face of anyone at all, and nobody would disbelieve it. He could be anyone he wanted to be, and with no questions asked.

It was so different than living in a wood where he was an outcast no matter what face he wore, or stumbling through a country he belonged to by blood but occupied only as a perpetual stranger.

Termina was so _different_.

"Granny," he asked an old woman, once, "why do you wear masks?" The question seemed so important at the time, back before he realized that it would always be his own face beneath the mask no matter how often he covered it.

He would never actually be anyone else but himself, and Termina would still take him. It was incredible.

It consumed him.

Granny closed her book and squinted at him. Her beady eyes caught the light of the fireplace and glimmered like she was remembering lifetimes from before Clock Town even existed. She was small, but her hunched-over body cast a long shadow from her place in her wheelchair.

"We wear masks to show parts of ourselves that you cannot see otherwise, Tortus. We wear masks so that we can fill the roles we need to and act as vessels for what's important."

He wasn't Tortus, and he never had been, but he nodded anyways.

Granny smiled and settled back in her chair. "Do the masks scare you, Tortus?"

"No," he said.

She smiled wider. "Well, that's good. You're a brave boy. They always scare poor Dotour."

"Thank you, Granny," he said.

She opened her book again, expectant. "Do you want to hear another story? I have the one about the great general Keeta and his army right here. It was always your favorite."

"Yes, Granny," he said, with one eye on the clock in the corner even as his eyelids grew heavier and heavier. He had been awake for three days straight, and the three days before that, too. "I would like that very much, thank you."

* * *

 **Author's Note:** Thank you very much for reading this experimental piece. I have a lot of fun writing them, but I hope they are understandable to you as well and make some kind of sense. Thank you again for reading and reviewing!


	2. Majora's Mask

"Long, long ago, before Clock Town, Termina was home to a kingdom of great power and renown. For millennia, it ruled over this land in harmony with the other creatures of the world. They made jeweled, painted palaces our of gold and gemstones mined with our neighbor Gorons to the north, back before even Snowhead existed, and built cities as far as Great Bay in the west alongside the Zora. The people identified themselves by the masks they wore in times of ceremony or times of strife, and to this day, the whispers of the old world live on in their masks.

They called their kingdom Ikana, for their kings were named Ikana."

"Granny," he said. The fire was so warm, and the quilt around him so soft. He wanted to close his eyes and let her take him to that golden kingdom in her book, but he knew he never could; the real Ikana was made of rot and ruin, just like Hyrule was seven years in a future nobody would see. "Granny, isn't Ikana the name of the canyon to the east?"

"Hush!" Granny licked her fingers and turned the page with practiced sternness. "Keep your questions in until the end!"

He settled back in his quilt. Tatl flicked his ear, just because.

Granny's dry voice soldiered on:

"Ikana was blessed, but their contented prosperity gave way to hubris. With their great fortune of resources, they built a tower so tall that it reached beyond the moon and to another world. Using their vast breadth of knowledge, they woke a god of hunger and desire, and spoke with them. When they were blessed with another plentiful harvest, they used it to win the favor of the god, and the god gave them the power to grant even their darkest wishes- for a price.

They called this god Majora, because it always wanted more, and anyone who knew Majora always wanted more than what they had, too."

"Granny," he said. The yellow-red eyes of Majora's Mask watched from above the Clock Tower for every second of these three days, and anyone who ever saw it would never need a reminder as to what it was. "Granny, what does this have to do with Skull Keeta?"

"Hush, Tortus!" scolded Granny. "I'm getting to it!"

Tatl snickered.

Granny cleared her throat, and picked up where she left off.

"Eventually, sacrifices were not enough. Majora wanted more. Though the god was selfish, they were also very clever- they told the people to make a mask it could inhabit, and to wear it so that they could walk among the people.

The people, so accustomed to the grace and honesty of the Four Giants, created a mask for Majora and wore it as the god asked.

In this way, the mask stole the wishes from the darkest parts of their hearts in secret, but what they did not know was that their mind and desires were twisted to mirror Majora's, like the way a still lake reflects the heavens when the moon is out.

They became a bloodthirsty people, a warlike people- and the Four Giants took notice."

"Granny," he interrupted, but his voice was so quiet that not even he realized that he was speaking.

Then, he was falling through the sky, to a place even beyond the ceiling of the world. Three golden triangles gleamed in front of a waterfall with no beginning and no end, and rainbows refracted from the mist lifting from the edges. A man in black armor grabbed them, but they split apart and left him trapped in a cage of light and nothingness- left them both trapped in a cage of light and nothingness. The man in black screamed his name and reached for his throat, but shackles of white light wrapped around his arms and legs and pulled him away, away, away, until he was less than a speck far in the distance.

With Ganondorf gone, he was all alone. He took a step forwards, and the echo reverberated through forever, infinitely. It never quieted, and it never stopped. He looked down at his feet, and at his hands. They were too large to be those of a child.

He touched his face. It felt wrong. The nose was too long and the brow and cheekbones too defined. He tried to pull it off like a mask, but it wouldn't come off because it wasn't a mask. It was his face. It was his real face, even though he knew it wasn't right.

He saw himself in the reflection of the pieces of gold still scattered about in the air. It was his real face.

He tried again to take it off, and his nails left red half-moons in the skin around his jawline when it didn't. There was a skeleton underneath, he knew; he was desperate to get to it. He had to try, or he would be stuck like this forever. He had been turned to wood before, and then to rock, and then to something with scales and gills, but this was worse.

He came close to finding his real face, something acceptable, but even when his green collar was soaked brown-black and his fingers slick with red, he couldn't quite get to it. This false face, this new role, it consumed him.

He awoke in a cold sweat.

"Tortus?" asked Granny. "Tortus, did you fall asleep again?"

"That was almost two hours long," Tatl hissed in his ear. "You really had to fall asleep and make me listen to all of that?! Huh?!"

"Granny," he said, wiping his eyes and pulling himself from the blanket like an insect from a chrysalis. "Granny, I'm sorry. I'm so sorry."

Granny closed her book. "Oh, Tortus." She smiled beneath her hooked nose, wistful. "It's alright. I can read you another story tomorrow."


	3. Moon's Mask

Anju's food was legendarily bad, but it was hot and on the table. Anju herself was by the counter, staring into the depths of her pot of root vegetable stew. The warm glow from the fire bathed the kitchen in light and dyed the whites of the old, patterned tiles yellow like parchment. Turnips and carrots stuck out of crates along the wall and stared in horror at their brethren simmering within Anju's pot.

A stray ant crawled along the tracks of the grout, utterly out of place and oblivious.

"We used to be a cafeteria and not an inn, but nobody eats what I make," Anju said. She always dropped her professional face when he caught her alone, right before and during lunch, or if she decided to take a walk in the rain. "That's just how it is, I suppose." She shook her head. "I just can't get anything right."

He sat down at the table in the corner and experimentally prodded the sculpted rice with a fork. It held together like a pudding. He took a bite anyway, and swallowed.

"Anju, I think it's fine," he said.

Tatl gagged, and then flew down to mutter in his ear. "She could serve you straight poison, and you'd never know the difference!"

He grew up on a forest full of mushrooms, nuts, berries, fresh meat, and nothing else. Anything resembling grain or bread was bizarre on his tongue no matter what anybody did to it. Everything tasted strange to him, always.

He took another bite, this time of the stew.

"Nasty," said Tatl. The gentle glow of her snow-white wings fought the stain of the firelight with an indignant intensity.

"It's fine," he repeated, to Tatl, Anju, or himself. He didn't know which.

"Don't force yourself to eat it," said Anju.

"I'm not," he said.

Anju straightened up, wiped her face, and then moved her hands from her cheek to her apron strings like she couldn't decide what to do with them before finally resting one on her forehead and one on her hip. "Look, you don't have to say that. I know it's disgusting."

"It's not."

"Yes, it is. I know it is. Everyone's told me how terrible of a cook I am, ever since I was a girl. It's terrible, and I know it."

He loaded his fork. "This isn't terrible."

"Yes, it is."

"No, it's not," he said. "It's fine."

"It's not fine."

"I think it's fine," he said over his mouthful.

"It's not."

He tore the modest bread roll on the tray in two and bit into the larger half. "It's fi-"

Anju snatched the bread from his hands and pushed the tray away with a sloppy, discordant clatter. "Don't you dare say that to me! Not now! Nothing is fine! Nothing about this is fine!"

Stew splattered out of the bowl on the tray and onto his arm. It burned, and he flinched, but he didn't say a word about it when he saw Anju's face.

Her blue eyes cut into him like the teeth of an animal, desperate and wild, and her voice might as well have been the bells of the Clock Tower for the way she drowned everything else out and instead left only stunned silence in the aftermath.

He stared at her for the umpteenth time in three days, still struck by how much she looked like someone else- someone important. Someone who was and wore green like a sapling. Instead, Anju burned red like a sunset over a pale sea, but something about her made him think of the sunlight flooding through branches, and the taste of cold, brown clay on his tongue and brushing against his fingers.

He met a girl who looked the same as Anju once before, in Kakariko, but that wasn't the right person. Something was different. She was just Anju, the timid, clumsy, distracted adult woman at the inn, but she looked like someone else, someone so much more important.

It was probably the eyes. They had the same eyes as the ones in his memory. They swallowed him whole.

Anju drew her hand back from the table like she'd been burned instead of him, and looked away like she'd seen something she shouldn't have.

"I'm sorry," she said. "I'm… I shouldn't have been so harsh. I'm so sorry."

"It's," he struggled for the right word, and utterly failed to find it, "it's fine."

Tatl slammed her tiny palm square in the center of her tiny face, and slowly drifted down in the air until she hit the table and dramatically spread out over it.

Anju put her face in her hands, too, but it was entirely different. "It is not fine! You are a child, and you are our guest!"

"It really is, though," he said. "I've got it all under control, so it's going to be fine."

Anju shook her head and raked her fingers through her hair.

Tatl looked at them like she wanted nothing more than for the moon to come clean through the roof and end this conversation, expediently.

"Anju," he said, "really, it's fi-"

"Stop saying that!" Anju screeched. "Stop it! The moon is falling, my grandmother won't eat, my father is dead, Kafei is gone, and I-!" she turned around in a red-faced panic, and then saw the raised, red welt on his arm where the stew spilled over skin.

Anju covered her mouth. "I've burned you," she said.

He looked down at his arm, and shrugged. "I've suffered worse."

Really, it could have been so, so much worse.

Anju scrambled forwards and grabbed his hand. "I, I have, ah, at least let me- let me clean and dress it!" she begged, and then pulled him to his feet before he could even think to argue. "Bandages! A first aid kit! I have one in my room!"

Tatl dragged herself from the tabletop and slowly fluttered after them as Anju led the way down the worn hallway with stucco walls, around the corner, up the stairs, and to a wooden door inset with stained glass dyed colors almost synonymous with the painted faces of Clock Town itself. The Staff Only sign carved into the grain gave way as Anju opened the door and brought them inside.

They'd never been in here before, but he felt sure that the checkered bed clothes were just as worn as the three days before, the flowers on the table in front of the fireplace just as fresh, and the white dress between Anju's bed and her mother's still draped over a mannequin that sat uncomfortably between the two like the aftermath of a frigid, perpetual argument. The silver mask on the mannequin's face gleamed like a mirror. Anju gently moved the skirt of the dress to reveal a chest of drawers, and pulled a roll of bandages and a bottle of disinfectant out of them.

"Oh," she said, and winced. "I should have run it under water, first. And, and used soap."

He looked at the red welt on his arm, and shrugged. "We'll know for next time. I'll remember."

"Next time?" said Tatl, incredulous. "Next time?!"

Anju blinked. "Next time?"

"Says you!" exclaimed Tatl. "I'm sitting the next one out if all you're gonna do is make googly eyes at this lady for three days."

"Do what?" he asked, craning his head around so fast that his hat almost flew off of it. "Googly eyes?"

"Next time?" repeated Anju. Her face stilled, like it was a mask and the thing on the mannequin was her real face. Her shoulders started to shake as she put the bandages on the table.

"Googly eyes!" affirmed Tatl. "That's what you're doing! Right now! Look at yourself! You see her crying at the ranch once, and suddenly Tael and the rest of the world can wait!"

He swatted at the fairy with his burnt hand, but Anju caught it out of the air and held it still. Her hands were smooth, but not soft, and definitely not steady.

He watched her, speechless, stuck somewhere between Anju right now and the Anju who sat on Cremia's bed not sixty hours from now.

"Googly eyes," pressed Tatl.

"I'm not going to burn you again. I… I won't. I promise," said Anju. "I'm so sorry. I promise, I won't. I won't do something like that again. I'll never do anything like that again, ever."

She should know to never say never, especially when someone could push her to do the same thing over and over, infinitely, until the end of forever. He could make her life never-ending if he chose, all because he was still caught up in the mystery of how she could make him think of someone he knew, but not be her at all.

He didn't quite get it.

Anju began to slowly disinfect and dress his burn the same way she might prepare a body for burial. It stung.

He didn't dare move, though, even when her eyes darted to the white dress in the center of the room and her shy smile formed the answer to a question he didn't need to ask.

"My, my wedding is on the morning of the carnival," she said. "I was putting the finishing touches on my mask."

"Oh, she's taken," lamented Tatl, displaying insincerity at its finest. "So sorry, so, so sorry. I know it's such a shock."

Anju smiled weakly, flattered and conflicted. "You're sweet, but… yes, I have a fiance."

"Oh, yes," said Tatl. "Darling Kafei." She sank into the pillow of Anju's bed and made a dramatic show of pretending to swoon.

"Tatl," he warned.

"Oh, don't give me that face. We both know he's apparently out of the picture, so you might still have a shot."

"Tatl!" he hissed, and stood. Anju let go of his hand.

The wooden floorboards creaked as one of the inn's guests wandered absently down the hallway just outside the door, her mind dancing a million miles away. A snore drifted through the wall between Anju's room and the next, and they all sat trapped in this isolated bubble of a room, afraid to make a noise.

She looked into her lap. "Yes," she said. "Kafei," she ducked her head, "is missing."

"That's what boys like that do. They make a lot of promises and then leave you to sit there and wait for them to get their act together." Tatl stood up and put her hands on her hips, and narrowed her eyes at her partner. "You've plenty of time to rest, so let's go."

But," Anju covered her mouth, "but in his letter, Kafei said he would, he would-!"

"Don't think about that, now. Tell me about the mask," he said, taking a knee and steadying Anju's shoulders. "I've never been here. I've never seen your Carnival of Time- I'm a stranger to it. Tell me about that, instead. Tell me everything."

"So when the old lady does it, you fall asleep, but when she starts the waterworks you're all ears?!" Tatl said.

In his eyes, in that moment, Tatl may as well have been

Then, he looked back to Anju.

"Tell me," he said.

Anju wiped her eyes. "It's, it's a set of two. It… it's good luck. The man traditionally wears the mask of the sun, and the woman is…!"

Tears poured down her cheeks, and she turned her head to look up at the mask from her place on the floor. The moon's mask loomed over them like the real moon outside, hollow and hungry.

"Hey," said Tatl, rising from the bed, "maybe we should go. We're not helping, and time's wasting. We have an ocean to get to."

That could wait. There was time. He had all the time he needed. He was drowning in it. He used to always be just out of it, just short of it, just out of step with it before, but now it was his.

He had to believe that.

"Kafei," he said. "You're waiting here for Kafei?"

"I, I don't know!" Anju wept. "I don't know what the right thing to do is! I don't know!" She stared at the Moon's mask, trapped. "Should I stay, or should I leave?! Nobody has seen him for weeks, and then I get this letter, and...!"

"Send a letter back," he said. "Send a letter back, saying where you will be. That's how… that's how they work, right? Maybe he'll find you. Maybe he-!"

Anju reached into her blouse and pulled out a blood red envelope bordered with golden writing. "I can't- I, I can't! Mother, after this, after all of this, she'd…!"

"Then give it to me," he said, taking her hands. "Give it to me, and I'll-!"

Tatl dove through the air and slammed him in the cheek, elbow first.

"You insensitive moron! I push it, but you're making it worse! Let her be!"

"Tatl, she's waiting for someone." He whirled on the fairy with a wired energy that made him feel like simultaneously like he was made of static and dust and everything was blurry, and like he had fire chewing at the back of his eyeballs. "She's waiting for someone, but he's not going to find her if we don't find him and tell him where she is, or when! Don't you know what that's like?!"

"Waiting?! Yeah! I do! I'm waiting! I'm waiting for you to come to your senses!" Tatl said, snapping her tiny fingers in his face. "This is not the priority right now!"

He didn't know if his face could possibly convey what he was feeling, and how much he was feeling it. He was like an underground creature seized by the sudden need to claw his way to the sun, but his arms were tied and the ground was solid stone. "I was always just in time to be too late, but only because someone told me that I was! I never would have even known, if nobody told me! They would have been lost and stranded forever, and I wouldn't have known the difference! Do you know what that's like? Do you?! Do you?!"

Tatl tore at her hair. "Listen to yourself! What are you even talking about?! Do you even understand what you're saying?!"

No. No, he didn't understand it, but he felt like he almost could. The words were coming first, and the meaning later. It was right in front of him, close enough to touch, but somehow he couldn't figure out how to reach out and put his hands around it.

"Please," said Anju. Her hands were still in his. "Stop this. Forget I said anything. I… I have to get back to work. He might… a guest might come at any minute, and I need to be there."

"Anju," he said.

She shook her head. "I'm so sorry I burned you. That was inexcusable. Please forgive me."

"Anju, that's fine. I told you. Now, please-!"

"If that's fine, then this is too."

He grit his teeth, horrified. "Anju," he said.

"Thank you for staying at our inn," she said, voice softer than that of a dove. "Thank you for staying with us."

"Anju," he tried.

She pulled her hands away, and walked out the door without another word.


	4. Zora Mask

The water was wide beneath the obscured sun and glowering moon. The stucco walls of the remains of Ikana's seaside presence stuck out of the sand like bleached bones. Vivid blue mosaics bordered them and pointed out just how colorless the sky above was, and how sickly pale the water was. The art of the old kingdom put it to shame.

The river in Ikana Canyon used to flow through the center of Termina Field and empty into the western ocean, as well as the Southern Swamp, and the ocean waves used to creep much, much closer to the doorstep of today's Clock Town. Granny said these walls were levees that held back the ocean when her tide tried to claim more than her corner of the world. One day, Granny said, if the moon ever decided to come closer and call her forth, call her out of her corner and into the heart of the land, the ocean's waters would rise up in a great storm and sweep those walls away before swallowing the town.

In the distance, a hurricane spiraled in total isolation into the heaven. Its eyes were fixed on Clock Town. It was waiting. It dared not move before it was time.

Neither did Mikau, the Zora at his feet. Seagulls swirled above them on black-tipped wings, waiting for death to take him- take all three of them, probably, and then pull out their eyeballs like vultures and tear their flesh off like soft bread. Tatl had the wisdom to hide in his green hat in case one of them got impatient and chose to snatch her from the air and tear off her wings before they decided to take the rest of her apart.

There were no fish in the ocean. There had been no fish in the ocean. There was nothing to eat. They were starving, and Mikau was dying.

The ocean waited, hungry.

Mikau coughed, and water and blood spewed out of his mouth. The guitar on his back was made from the bones of an enormous fish, like the ocean waters had peeled all the flesh from it with a rough, salty tongue, and left only the skeleton behind when it spit both it and its owner to the surface.

"Please," uttered Mikau. "Please heal me. Please."

"I cannot save you," he said to Mikau. "As I am now, I cannot save you from this. I'm sorry."

Mikau lay still, but then, suddenly, like a man possessed, pushed himself to his feet and pulled the guitar strapped on his back into his hands.

"Words!" Mikau cried, his voice dry and ravaged by harsh salt water and sand. "It's just words! Don't speak words to me without music!" His eyes, yellowed and shrivelling, searched the horizon, and then looked to the moon. "Hear me!" he cried, and struck the strings of his guitar. "While I still live! Hear me! Hear me, as I am now!"

Then, Mikau started singing. Of all the things he could choose to do in that moment, he started to sing. The gulls squawked in alarm, and then scattered.

Most of it was beyond comprehension, but all of it was rough, loud, emphatic, and totally foreign.

Mikau hit a final note, and then collapsed into the white sand, arms outstretched. His right arm was encased in a tattoo of red and blue, like an echo to the veins of ink that ran over the left arm of Darmani's corpse.

"Lulu," Mikau muttered. "Lulu, I'm so sorry. Please… her eggs. The babies. Please..."

"I can play for you," he said. The blue ocarina was cold in his hands. He'd kept his fingers on the handle of his sword instead, confused about what mercy meant and how to use it.

He played. He played this song, this one, because he knew it backwards and forwards. Mikau's body began to fade away like a stain beneath running water. Death lapped at him like waves.

But his face remained. It peered out over the coast of the Great Bay, fixated on a point far in the distance that only it could see, and then fell over to stare unblinking at the sky.

He picked it up. "Mikau," he said, and flipped it over. "Lulu."

Tatl sneered. "Great. Another girl. You into fish? Don't tell me you're into fish."

"He said something about eggs," he said. "Lulu has children. He cared about them."

"No," corrected Tatl. "He cared about her, probably. The kids are just a nasty surprise after the fact, sounds like."

"What makes you say that?" he asked.

"Adults tend to do that," she said. "Adults think that way about children. That's why fairies find them, you know. Because adults don't want them anymore, and don't want to keep pretending like they do." She huffed. "Zora adults can't be that different."

"I've heard that. But my fairy didn't find me like that," he said. "She came after that happened. Long after that."

"You had a fairy companion?!" Tatl pushed off of his head and dashed out of his hat to stare at him. He could feel her fingertips release his scalp in ten minutely different places. "No way. You're not a Kokiri. You can't be. I don't know what you are, but it's not that."

Her words stung. He stared into Mikau's inky black eyes to avoid hers.

"I know," he said, and that stung worse. He felt the same as he did when he first looked into the water and saw the reflection of a Deku Scrub staring back at him, or when he was himself seven years in a future he never should have lived.

One form was a nightmare, and the other an abomination.

"I know I that I cannot be a Kokiri," he said. "But I have a fairy companion, and she is not you."

Tatl snorted. "Oh, yeah? Tell me more, Tingle. Where is she?"

"Somewhere," he said, and his boots left uneven footprints as he followed the waterline and trekked through the sand.


	5. Kafei's Mask

"Oh," said Madam Aroma, peering down at him through her opera glasses, "yes. Yes, it must be you. I can see it in your eyes. You're much more worldly than your cute little face says."

"Ma'am," he said, impassive.

Tatl lighted on him like a hand on his shoulder.

The room itself was generously sized, but the shelves and tables and serving ware and chairs and couches and flower vases were overloaded with so many things that it was clear something important was missing.

The fireplace in Aroma's office was the plainest thing in the carpeted drawing room. As for everything else, if it could be patterned, it was patterned, and if it wasn't patterned, the dye in the fabric glimmered and shone with garish wealth. Beautiful china and ornate books lined her bookshelves by the door, and the dainty, embroidered throw pillows on her sofa reminded him of two small, yapping, pampered dogs with bows in their hair. Toto, Mikau's band manager, sat between them, just across from the Madam. His scrawny legs dangled beneath his round body, and his stubby, two-lobed tail flicked back in forth in time with the ticking of the ornate wooden clock above the fireplace mantle like he was keeping time until the last moments of the world.

Toto didn't know Mikau was dead yet. He didn't know who was wearing his face, either, but that could wait.

They had no idea if he knew Lulu was a mother, and Mikau a father.

"My son," continued Aroma, "He's missing."

"Kafei," he said.

"Oh!" said Aroma. "You already know. You're much more experienced than you look, as I thought."

The lineup of rings and gems lining the Madam's knuckles flashed in the light as she reached over to the rich mahogany end table to her left and opened its single drawer.

An eyeless face peered out of the drawer, with a mouth pulled into a noncommittal line. The expression and character of the person it belonged to was an utter mystery.

"My son looks like this," said Aroma. "You can take this with you if you think it will help."

He picked up the mask, and flipped it over. "His marriage is in three days," he said, putting it on. "To Anju, the woman at the inn."

Aroma's round face and oversized lips made her eyes look small and beady, but they sparkled like a brook under the morning sun. "Yes," she said. "He wouldn't jeopardize that for the world. He wouldn't. He wouldn't run off like that. He—!"

A sudden muffled cry through the wall cut her off.

"You cowards!" It said, with the strain of a man who had spent his whole life screaming and wasn't quite ready to quit. "You just want to run away!"

Aroma grimaced. "Please excuse my husband's council. They're discussing something of, ah, lunar proportions."

"Why do you want to find him?" he asked. He peered at her through the eyes of the mask.

"Excuse me?"

"Kafei. Your son. Why do you want so much to find him?"

Tatl pinched his ear.

Aroma paused, reached for her dainty teacup, and then thought better of it. Her gauze scarf fluttered around her fat body like her heartbeat.

"He's my son," said Aroma, like it meant something. "Of course I want to find him. He is more important to me than anything else in my life, even my husband."

"The moon is going to fall in three days. Isn't it better that he stay wherever he is, as far from here as possible?"

Tatl's fingers were like needles now. Toto's globular eyes betrayed nothing, but they did focus on the two of them with an opinion lurking somewhere behind them.

"I love my son," said Aroma, her face changing color even behind her thick mask of makeup. Her clenched fists shook. "Please. I have to find him. We should be together as a family, even in the end."

"You say you love your son?" he asked.

"I love my son," she said.

"Do you really?" he asked. "What about his fiancé, Anju? What if she wanted to find him more than you did?"

"Don't start this," Tatl hissed in his ear. "Even if it's true, don't do this!"

"What if he was with her instead, because he chose her over you?"

The clock on the wall crept forwards. Each second was precious. Aroma needed every single one she wasted in order to pull herself together.

"I love my son," Aroma repeated, her voice a dedicated, intense hush. "I need to know. No matter what, I need to know."

She put down her opera glasses and leveled a stare at him. "No matter what, I love my son. Find him."


	6. Gibdo Mask

"This land was destined to fade," Tatl said, like those were her words and not the words of a prophecy foretold by a source unseen. "Do you think the Skullkid promised that ghost composer that Ikana could have all of Termina if he helped kill it? Have a bunch more dead people for the Kingdom of the Dead, or something?"

"I don't know what he might've promised," he said. He pulled himself out of the water.

The river had only begun to flow freely just now, right this very moment, after years and years and years of a slow and inevitable death, because the ghost who selfishly held back the waters at the source was washed away in a storm of emotion at his brother's final message. It caught him by surprise, too, and before he knew it, he was in over his head while the water rose up and swept away the pollution of old bones and dust blocking its path.

"We should've asked," said Tatl.

He took off his hat and wrung it out like he could expulse the issue like water from cloth. His tunic was soaking wet, too, and so was everything he carried with him. The released waters rolled by without him and overtook their old track like a clumsy, frothy stampede.

The entire canyon was dry, dead, and destined to stay that way even though the clearest water now rolled through the cracked, flaking earth. It was too little, and too late. No matter what anyone did, this land would never be green, and this river could never flow deep and fast enough to touch the ocean to the west the way it used to ever again.

"This place reminds me of you," Tatl said, craning her head to scale the canyon wall, and then the enormous tower rising out of and above it.

He paused, hat in hand, and looked around.

There was no grass, except a few pale, anemic strands mummified from the sun, and no trees besides two petrified husks in the shade of the canyon walls. The rock walls around them featured fading, worn carvings of skulls and masks, or enormous, black-eyed bodies with parched, hungry tongues rolled out towards the water. The cracked plaster over and around them was painted in patterns that echoed the walls of Clock Town like the muffled call of a lost child from one end of a long, dark tunnel to the other. The few still-standing, still-abandoned houses lined up along the edges of the riverside- the old riverside- older than even now, back when the river ran higher, fuller, wider, and pooled into a lake just shy of the houses- stared across the canyon at the gates of a holed-up palace sleeping inside like a body in a tomb.

"What," he asked Tatl, "are you trying to say?"

"Oh! Look," said Tatl, flying out of arm's length. "The river's flowing, so maybe the waterwheel will start working now."

In the middle of the canyon, a single, suspicious house sat right in the center of the old riverbed, just by the track of the newly-freed stream. A water wheel made of wood obviously not grown here hung off its side and in the river's track. The metallic blue paint coating the house itself was foreign and new, and the gleaming gold horns mounted on the roof glinted obliviously in the noonday sun. It looked like a music box.

Undead bodies wrapped in rotting linen wandered around it like flies around fruit.

"Tatl. What did you mean by that?" he prodded.

"So, about your horse. You left her down in the canyon. Is she going to be alright? Kind of a weird place to leave a horse."

"Tatl," he prompted. "Don't change the subject."

"But she's just out there. Alone." Tatl bobbed in the air like she was keeping time. "Whinnying."

"Tatl."

The water hit the wheel like wind hits a sail. It groaned, and then started moving.

"Tatl," he repeated.

Tatl hurried into his face and fluttered back and forth in front of his nose. "Look, you got into this mess because of that horse, alright? She spooks easily! You need to watch her! I'm serious!"

"Tatl," he said, and he would have said more if the music box house had not started to sing. At first, the notes were sloppy and disjointed as the water and wheel took a moment to remember how to work together, but soon they hit their stride and the horns atop the house broadcasted the most anachronistic melody possible for the dead kingdom of Ikana. It echoed through the canyon and drowned out its lonely winds like it was mocking the canyon's serious drear and the moon's grimacing face.

The raised dead, the Gibdo, couldn't take it. They covered their ears and fled into the dirt just to avoid it.

"I'll be," said Tatl. "It really is just like your ocarina. It's obnoxious, suspicious, cheerful, and makes mysterious things happen when it plays. It's even blue!"

He turned to her. "Tatl, tell me what you mean to say."

The door to the music box house opened like it was timed to give Tatl an exit from this very moment. A girl in a bright pink dress stepped out.

Tatl flew across the river. "Look!" she said. "A little girl!"

She crossed the river shore like a cloud cutting across the sallow sky above.

The girl turned around so fast she almost fell into the water. Her face was round, and so was her nose, and the brown bob of her hair made both look even rounder.

"Hey!" Tatl called. "Little girl! What're you doing out here?! It's depressing, and there are monsters here, you know?"

She must have thought Tatl was one, if the speed at which she ran back into the door of her house was any indication. The painted pink and yellow flower on the front rattled as she slammed it shut. Tatl slammed right into the center of it.

He gave her a slow, deliberate, standing ovation in time with the annoying song spinning around their heads.

"Have you learned anything from this experience about speaking badly of other people?" he asked.

"Yeah," said Tatl, rubbing her nose. "I learned that you can shut your mouth."

He picked Tatl up, put her on his shoulder, and then knocked on the door.

"Go away!" said the little girl.

"Alright," he said.

"Alright?!" screeched Tatl.

Then, he said, "But don't come out, either. I am going to take off my clothes and let them dry in the sun."

"What?!" said Tatl, scandalized.

He started fiddling with his belt as he walked towards the river, alongside the shore.

"The last thing I need is to get sick," he said, pulling off his sword and shield, and then his masks one by one. "I would rather not spend the last thirty-six hours with a cold from something like this."

Tatl sneered. "I don't know. Maybe you would. Maybe if you showed up at the inn all sick and helpless, Anju would take care of you." She snickered. "Gloomy you, even in broad daylight. Full of haunted places and stories nobody remembers."

"Ah," he said. "So that's what you meant."

She snorted. "'Look at me; I look like a sad little boy even though I'm not scared of monsters and can put on my own boots. Pity me because I don't have any friends. Wah, wah.'"

He pulled off his tunic and threw it over her. Both hit the ground with a wet slap.

"Oh, look," he said. "A perfect fit." He sat down, pulled off one boot, and then the other. The music box house and its song loomed over him like a voyeur.

"What're you going to do if those Gibdos come back? Or a Garo. If they see you sprawled out here like a steak on a grill and decide it's lunchtime, I'm not stopping them."

"They won't."

He set out his masks to dry, and arranged a few of them around himself- Darmani to his right, towards the north, Mikau to the west, the lost child to the south- and then rested his head east, towards the source of the river. He held the Mask of Truth above himself, and then put it over his face to keep the sun out of his eyes and block the moon from his view.

"You could die here," she warned. "The ones with a physical form are gone, sure, but this place is teeming with bloodthirsty spirits who would love to get ahold of something like you." Her wings chimed as she let out her frustration. "Don't you feel that?! That evil?! That unrest?! Don't you feel it?!"

"Wake me up if anything happens," he said.

"You know what? Forget it." She threw her arms in the air and surrendered. "You're the freakiest thing here, anyway. I guess I'll just sit here and listen to this… music."

"If anything happens, Tatl."

Beneath them, the earth trembled like the water from his skin had made it shiver. The air rumbled in discomfort.

"Get up," Tatl said, bored. "Hear that? Something's happening."

He ignored her, and closed his eyes. The sun beat down on him without mercy, and the ground beneath him was so hard that his wet body didn't even inspire mud. Around him spiralled the tirelessly cheerful melody of the music box house until he started counting his breaths in his head and didn't hear it anymore.

He remembered a well, and the bottom of it coated in blood and illusion, and a grove in deepest darkness made entirely of rotted hands and yellowed teeth. It had holes for eyes, but no eyes.

He saw a creature with no head and no arms, and eyes in the end of its neck and the center of its palms. They stared at him, and spoke with the beat of an eternal drum. They sounded like minutes. Minutes sped into seconds. His heart beat in time, and then faster and faster until he lost track. Four ghosts watched him from the steps of their house, trees and bushes uprooting the foundation like a grove made of nothing but hands and teeth waiting to tear it down.

They'd taken something important and held it in a closed fist, with fingers like branches, with branches clenched like teeth. He'd lost it. He couldn't put a name to it, but he knew he'd never get it back.

Maybe an hour passed. Maybe thirty minutes. The fact that he didn't know with intimate certainty what the passage of time was when he opened his eyes made him nervous, but not as nervous as the expression of the little girl standing above him. She had a towel in her hands.

"You went to the spring just before it started flowing again. I saw you, through the window."

He didn't say anything. He only exhaled.

"Where did you get these masks?" she asked.

"I guess he's still asleep," said Tatl. "Want me to wake him up? Gives me a good excuse to shove something in his ears."

"No. I know he's awake," the girl said. She threw the towel over him.

"Ten," he decided. "It's been ten minutes. Tatl?"

"Yeah," she said. She was sitting just below the mask's eye. "Almost exactly ten minutes. I shouldn't be surprised by how good you are at that anymore."

"Where did you get these masks?" the girl repeated.

He sat up. The Mask of Truth fell into his lap. "South, north, west, east," he said, and pointed them out in order. It was the greatest understatement he had ever spoken. He pointed to the Mask of Truth's one eye, and hit Tatl in the head in the process. "And some from Clock Town. That is where I got them."

"That's not a good answer."

"Is it important?" he asked.

"Yes," she said, without hesitation. "It's very important."

"Do you really need to know?"

"Yes."

"How badly do you need to know?"

"Badly enough to come out here where more of those monsters are."

He hummed. Then, "Really. How badly?"

The girl paused, and clenched her fists. "Badly enough to let you come into our house, depending on what you say."

"And?"

"A-and?" she asked. "And what? What?"

He levelled a stare at her. "And then, what will you have me do inside your house if my masks are what you think they are?"

Tatl looked between the two of them with some interest picking up her brows.

The girl, Pamela, as he would later learn, bit her lip and looked between him, Tatl, and the jury of faces on the ground.

"He can't know," she said. "Your fairy, she-"

"I'm my own fairy and my name is Tatl, thank you," said Tatl.

"She's not my fairy," he said, at the same time.

Pamela looked between them. "Tatl. My father can't see you. And you," she looked to him. "He can't know what you have. He can't know there's anything," her dark eyes widened as she searched for the word, "strange about you. Anything at all. He'll know. Once you help me, you've got to act normally."

The music played on, undercut by the sound of the water flowing by.

"Sorry," said Tatl. "You have a better chance of passing off a horse as human than you do asking him to act like anything close to a regular boy, Terminian or otherwise. Speaking of horses, do you think your horse is-?"

He put the Mask of Truth on over his face, and leaned in. Pamela straightened and tensed, like she expected that it might try and steal her mind.

"At least pretend like you're trying to act normal when someone's just met you!" Tatl scolded.

"Your father," he said. "You love him. He's an adult, right?"

"Of course he is," said Pamela, her mouth turning down into a resolute frown. "All fathers are."

"But you love him?"

"Yes," said Pamela. "I wouldn't be here asking you anything if I didn't."

"He's done something," he said. "Something dangerous."

"Stop cold-reading me," she said. "I know about cold-reading. It's fake."

"Of course it is. Lots of things are fake. But I need to know, so tell me. Does he love you?"

A hitch in the gears paused the music box tune, but it started again.

"You are the worst," said Tatl. "Take that thing off and talk straight. Please. Please! You drive me crazy enough as it is, without all this nonsense!"

Pamela wrinkled her nose and held back the tears forming over her eyes. "Of course. He makes reckless decisions sometimes, but of course he loves me."

"Are you sure?"

"How dare you!" Tatl hollered, so loudly that the music box melody faded away, and dove at him. "You insensitive little cretin! Don't you understand anything?!"

He took off the Mask of Truth and dug her words back out like relics from a crypt, or bones from a grave. "Adults can love just fine, but that doesn't mean you should trust them," he said. "Especially not with children."

"That's not our business!"

"My father loves me," repeated Pamela.

"They're stupid, and selfish," he said. "It's the way they are."

Tatl pulled at his hair with more energy than she ever had before. "Even if they'll forget when you start everything over again, you can't just say these things to people! Their hearts and lives aren't for you to know, you selfish little bastard!" Tatl screamed.

His eyes had never left Pamela. "Are you sure it would not be better just to leave him to this fate he's made for himself?"

"What?" she asked, and it was almost lost amid the incessant noise of her house. It grated on his ears. He wanted to hide in the earth just to escape from it.

"If I'm going to help him, I need to know," he said. "Most of these are death masks," he said. "They're faces of those who died in body, but could not rest in spirit. His regrets might be his curse, or his undoing, depending on what they are. Are you prepared for that?"

Pamela threw her hands on the dry earth. "Save him!" she cried. "Please! Please save my father! I love him, and he loves me!"


	7. Sun's Mask

He went to Anju's room on the night of the third day. Everything was unlocked. Everything. There wasn't a soul in the town, except for the weeping, trembling soldiers and a lonely craftsman screaming his grievances to the moon, because he still had not lived long enough to say everything he wanted to say, and he couldn't believe that he might forever go unheard. His shouts echoed through the empty stone neighborhoods and vacant Carnival stalls like ghosts.

"Why did you come here?" Tatl asked him, when they were halfway from the gate to the Stock Pot Inn. "Why did you take the time to come here, and why now? It's almost done. Termina is almost at the end, and we have so much we still have to finish!"

"I have to see," he said.

No torches burned in the eastern neighborhood. No torches burned anywhere. It was pitch black, except for Tatl's emphatic, pulsing glow. A tremor shook the earth like it might try and snuff it out.

It didn't.

"No," Tatl said, flying in front of him with a blinding energy. "You don't. You don't have to see. I know you'll never listen to me, but for once- just for once- at least consider that you don't have to put yourself through this."

"I have to see something," he said.

"See what?!" Tatl asked. "See the final fate of this world?!" She pointed west. In the daylight, a mural on the wall dividing the southern square from the eastern neighborhood featured whorls of painted waves pushing across the surface. "See the oceans rise and swallow us?" She pointed north. "See the mountains fall, and the blizzards rage and crush us?" She pointed up, in case he wasn't aware of the moon and Majora. "See what?! See the end of the world, and know that my brother has seen it with us, or come to the edge and stared off the precipice and into the void every time- every time- without the comfort of knowing that you can pull us back each time, every time?! See what?!"

"No," he said. "None of that. I know what that looks like, and that is not my intention." He paused. "Have faith."

"You have never been helpless," snapped Tatl.

Then, she wept.

"Don't tell me that. Don't. You, and that Mask Salesman. Don't ask that of me. Please."

"I've asked nothing of you before now," he said, and cupped his hands beneath where she floated.

She tossed her head and covered her feet, but then lowered herself to sit in his open palms.

"Thank you," he said.

The door of the Stock Pot Inn stood open. Tatl's glow illuminated the sign and the crescent moon upon it. It had a face like the full one hanging above them, except the nose looked more like Granny's and less like that of the Apocalypse.

He smiled despite himself.

The Inn was empty, and it was dark. The vase of flowers on the counter cut an eerie silhouette in Tatl's low light, and the list of names and times in the open guest book read like an obituary.

"They have fled to stay with Cremia and Romani, now, I'm sure," he said. "We'll see if Kafei comes, and then we'll go."

"This isn't your business," Tatl said. "You nosy little monster."

"Whatever you say," he said, "you thieving little fairy."

She sniffled. "Why aren't you afraid of this place? It's so lonely. It's so empty. I can't stand it."

"Loneliness frightens me almost more than anything else," he said. "But this couldn't possibly be lonely. You're here," he said. "I'm here. We're here together."

The clock on the wall clicked as it crept forwards to mark another hour passed.

"Thank you," he said to her, for the second time that day and the first time in this hour.

The two of them climbed the stairs in the darkness, one by one, and then opened the door to Anju's room. Her wedding mask's profile gleamed in the eerie moonlight filtering through the window while its eyes stared passively at the fireplace. The room was the same as last time they had seen it empty, when she had walked out on them.

Except, this time, Anju was there, too, and on her feet when he so much as turned the doorknob.

He could not see his own expression, but he knew it was the same as Tatl's- wide-eyed and confused.

"Anju," he said.

"It's you," she said.

"You stayed,"

"I stayed."

The earth beneath their feet shook. The table and chair rattled, and the mannequin with the wedding dress threatened to fall over.

Then, it stopped.

"...Why?"

"I thought about what you said, and I believe him." She turned around. "I have made up my mind."

"Anju," said Tatl. "Oh, Anju, what if he—?"

"I'm fine with this," she said, smoothing the back of her skirt and sitting back down. "It's fine." She smiled. "It's fine."

He had not expected her to wait. She was not supposed to be here. But Anju had waited, and the seconds counting down in his head with an easy consistency stopped and frittered away into a nonspecific, ambiguous haze that clouded his vision. He thought he might stop breathing. He had not accounted for this, and it caught him by surprise.

Kafei might go to Anju. He might go to his mother. He might not go to either of them. He didn't know. Time spread forth from his feet like a labyrinthine set of roots with an infinite number of branches he had yet to explore, and an unfathomable ending that he was not prepared to contemplate.

"I'm glad," he said to Anju, throat dry, "that you have made your decision. Do with your time what you will."

Tatl grabbed his thumbs, and held tight. "Someone waited for you, once. That's what you said. And you needed to see," she whispered, and then turned her huge eyes from Anju and to the person holding her. "You needed to see." Fresh tears ran down her face. "Loneliness is the thing you are most afraid of, someone waited for you, you were late, and you needed to see."

"Nevermind that," he said, under his breath. "That's not important. I can see another day. I can see at any time."

"She has faith," Tatl said. "Have faith."

He swallowed. The earth shook again, and when the vase on the table fell over and shattered, he almost split his two hands apart and dropped Tatl.

"Have faith," she said, still cradled in his hands. "Wait and have faith."

He closed his eyes and thought of somewhere far from here, in a wooded grove with ruins leaning against the trees like old friends. Someone sat on a stump bigger than he was, bigger than they were, and played a melody he knew by heart backwards, just because.

"We are out of time," he murmured.

"You have all the time in the world," said Tatl, leaning forwards. "Have faith."

They waited. But the sun did not come, and neither did Kafei.


	8. Keaton Mask

The air smelled of dew and sawdust, and of grass from the other side of the wall brought in by the southern winds. The all-seeing clock face turned its head minute by minute just to get a better look at the slow and constant construction for the Carnival of Time coming together at its feet.

For the Tower, company only came through its upper doors on midnight of the Carnival, but this year was different. Someone was already there and had been for days in triplicate.

The Skull Kid and his mask- and Tael- were guests of honor, and invited the moon to come along. There simply wasn't room for these townspeople, and it was almost a problem three days from now when the moon was just a hair's breadth away from arrival and the rest of the world was still in its way, but at the last possible instant, the very last one, the clock miraculously and pointedly rewound back to today, right now, at six o'clock in the morning.

Dawn of the first day. Seventy-two hours remained.

It was business as usual in the town, or all the farcical appearances of it: the wooden Carnival Tower in front of the Clock Tower had a foundation and about a dozen craftsmen. They hurried around with their hammers and wood even though nobody would ever see their labor when it was finished and beautiful. Nobody would notice, even though it was right in the middle of the plaza and by all rights unignorable.

He empathized deeply with that. So did the soldier standing just on the other side of the unfinished tower, just inside the open maw of the town's Southern Gate, probably.

To the soldier's right, just beside the Southern Gate and right before the path to the little reservoir of the communal laundry pool, a red-hatted mailbox sat cheerily in the rising sunlight while a boy in a bright yellow mask quarreled silently with himself over whether or not to push a purple-pink-white envelope inside the box slot.

This scene was quintessentially Terminian. Covered faces were comically mundane here. Cyclical, repetitive internal crises were comically mundane here. Postboxes, letters, and coded, secret messages were comically mundane here.

And yet, this moment was utterly, unquestionably suspicious every single time he'd seen it.

"He didn't come," whispered Tatl. "Kafei. I thought… I really thought, based on what I'd heard people saying, that he just wanted to avoid his mother because he's the mayor's son and Anju is…!" She sat on his shoulder, trembling. "I thought for sure he'd be there. But he wasn't."

Normally, what would happen was this: the masked boy would bring himself just to the box and freeze, and then stare like he could see through the envelope and to the words written inside before he finally sent the thing and ran away to the laundry pool like he intended to throw himself into the water and not surface.

"I'm so sorry," said Tatl.

Right now, the masked boy was just shy of the postbox, still staring at the letter in his hands.

Tatl cried to the sky. "I'm so sorry for everything!"

Her voice may as well have been the bark of the nearby dog urinating on the town walls for all the sense it made in his ears.

He walked across the plaza with sudden, inspired purpose. Tatl fell off his shoulder and caught herself in the air.

"Wh-where are you going?!" She cried. "Wait! Please! I never meant for—!"

The masked boy didn't look up from his letter, even when a shadow fell across it. But, when spoken to, he looked up and backed up like he'd been caught doing something wrong.

"What is so important about that letter?" he asked, with hands that could barely keep still.

"What?" Tatl asked. "Who is this?"

"What is so important about that letter?" he repeated.

The boy backed away and made to run, but he wasn't strong enough to break the sudden grip around his wrist.

"Let go of me!" said the boy.

"Let go of him!" echoed Tatl.

"Tell me," he said. He pulled Kafei's Mask from his side and put it on. The boy and the mask had the same color of hair, and he knew that they had the same face, too. He just knew.

"I see you do this every time. I see you mail this letter instead of taking it yourself. She gets it at three. You could be there and back twice before then, if you took it yourself." He bared his teeth. "Tell me why."

The boy pulled back his free hand and punched his accoster in the face. Kafei's Mask- the likeness from Aroma- fell off and hit the ground.

"Let me go!" The boy said, and punched him again, right in the nose. "This does not concern you!"

He punched back, and harder. The yellow fox mask cracked under his knuckles.

"You've got to stop this!" Tatl chimed. "It's-! I know it's hard, it's so hard to watch and do nothing, but this is none of your business! None of this is your business! You can't take your anger out on someone just because—!"

"It became my business the second I came here! You made it my business, so don't cry to me about the consequences of your own recklessness and cruel decisions!" he said to the fairy, and then threw the masked boy into the wall.

The black nose on the yellow fox mask shredded against the rough brick as they collided. The boy groaned.

"Tell me why," he said, right in the boy's ear. "One day and a half from now, I saw a girl make every sacrifice and leap of faith she could for a man stupid enough to become a monster- a real monster- even though he was reckless, foolish, ignorant, selfish, and too naive to even know he was all those things even before he became a monster. He is an adult, but she loves him anyway. She is a child, but he still wants him with her."

"Wh-what?! That situation is completely—!"

"How," he continued, with real heat in his voice, "can it be that the two of them stayed together, and would until the end despite that- despite all of that- despite the fact that he is an adult and she is a child, and adults don't want children and children should not trust adults, but you cannot work up the nerve to stay with anyone, even when they would give anything to find you?!"

"Let go of me!" said the boy.

"You're just like Mikau!" he cried. "You're just like Darmani, and that idiot Goron Elder! You're like composer Sharp! You're like, you're like—!"

He could see her face, both as an adult and a child. He could see Navi, too, but he dared not speak her name. He dared not speak either of their names and admit it.

Instead, he pushed the boy into the wall again like he could press both of them back to the topic at hand.

"Calm down!" shouted Tatl.

"You chose the selfish thing, the thing that tears people apart, that hurts everyone, and then failed! You failed, utterly, when what you should have done is gone to Anju and told your mother!"

Tatl weaved around the two of them, desperate to find an opening and pry them apart. "What're you on?! This isn't Kafei! This is a child, and Kafei is—!"

"I promised to do this the right way!" Kafei, the figure against the wall, cried. "It's improper for a groom to see his bride before the wedding day! And I cannot marry her without my mask! I cannot! I promised her!"

Tatl fell still, and eerily silent.

"Use the mask you have on if you have to use one!" he hissed. "It's just a trinket! It doesn't actually matter!"

"It does! It does matter!" Kafei shouted, kicking his legs and flailing his free arm. The paint of the fox mask flaked liberally as it scraped against the wall. "How would you know?! How could you know anything?! What would you know about the promises of adults, and what they mean?! What would you know about what it means for a man to give his word?!" The mask moved crooked on his face and a single, leering red eye stared out of the gap. "You're nothing but a child!"

He whirled Kafei around, tore off his mask, and slugged him.

"Always," he said, and hit him again. "And so are you!"

Kafei reached out, pulled his hat down over his eyes, and grabbed him by the throat.

He saw red. He grabbed Kafei's wrists, and spun his body so that Kafei rammed into the mailbox's jagged corners.

Kafei gasped and let go, and then stumbled. He pulled his hat from his eyes and threw all of his weight onto Kafei. The two of them hit the ground. Kafei's blood and spittle mixed with the dust and dirt of the plaza, and more of it spritzed out of him as blow after blow collided with his jaw.

Sword and shield sat upon his back, utterly forgotten in the roiling heat of the moment. The sound of the workers and their tools in the middle of the plaza kept time with his fists.

Honestly, he might have killed Kafei had a pair of strong arms not grabbed him and pulled him away.

"Boys!" It was the soldier from the Southern Gate. Tatl floated at his side. "There's no need for this! What would your mothers say?"

"Don't talk to me like I have a life like yours!" He hissed, struggling against the soldier's hold and engaging his plate mail in raucous clattering against the shield on his back.

Kafei rolled onto his side and plucked his ruined, scarred mask from the ground. He replaced it over his face and dragged himself to his feet with the help of the nearby mailbox. Specks of blood stained his tawny and indigo shirt, and his long white sleeves were covered in dirt.

Kafei steadied himself, and then crookedly darted away and to the laundry pool.

"Get back here!" he shouted, and almost broke free in pursuit.

"Calm down!" said the soldier. "Let him be! Whatever it was, I'm sure he's plenty sorry about it now!"

"Not sorry enough!" he hissed. "I'll drag his sorry ass where it needs to go, if I have to!" He clawed at the air before his arm was recaptured. "I will give him regrets if he has none! I'll rip off his face and wear it on mine, if that is the way it must be!""

"Kid, you've got to calm down! Where is your father?"

"He doesn't have one," said Tatl, face blank.

"You didn't just appear here on your own. Someone's got to be responsible for you, so—!"

He wrenched himself free, teeth gnashing, and whirled around on the poor soldier. "I'm the bastard son of a land that couldn't stomach me, and there's nobody left who knows me that wants me!" He drew his sword. It flashed in the light like fire. "Does that answer your question?!"

The soldier held his hands up, palms out. "W-woah! Let's calm down, alright? Nobody here wants to hurt you, okay?"

"Words are cheap, sir!"

"Alright," said the soldier. "Alright. Alright. The town's in a big enough panic as it is and I understand you're scared, but we have to keep our heads cool. I'm not going to draw on you. Just," he eased his hands out in front of himself, slowly. "Just put your sword away and I'll let you go. I've got to get back to my post."

He knew this soldier. He knew all four of the gate guards, but he particularly remembered standing next to this one as he stared his final hours in the face and talked about his family, just before the fireworks went off and the door to the Clock Tower finally opened.

He put away his sword, disgusted. "The moon's falling in three days," he said. "Nothing and no one is deranged enough to enter that gate but me. Leave the town to take care of itself, and let your captain argue until he chokes, if that is what he wants to do."

The soldier gaped.

On the ground by the mailbox lay Kafei's letter. The satin finish of the paper was free from signs of a scuffle. He snatched it up and walked away without a second glance.

Tatl followed, wordless.

The western neighborhood was by far the loveliest. Neat rows of bricks paved the series of wide stairs and delineated the string of narrow, overflowing flowerbeds leading uphill and to the north. Shops with colorful signs and brightly-colored windows lined the road even though business was slow and their prospects were decidedly grim.

As he blew down the roads like an ill wind, so too did Tatl, without a single chime of displeasure.

He stopped in the middle of the cul-de-sac at the end, the letter still in his hands. The Western Gate stood wide open just beyond it, and the ocean just beyond that, quietly threatening to push past the walls and swallow the town at a moment's notice.

He was so angry. He was so angry, he thought the feeling might swallow him from the inside out, and then flood the town.

Tatl said nothing.

"What?!" he finally screamed. His voice bounced off the walls and ricochet down the brick paving. A lone child reading a sign, the only other person in the neighborhood, fell over in surprise.

"What is it?! What retort do you have for me?! What have I done now to disappoint you, Tatl?!"

She fluttered her wings and tilted her head, but that was all.

"Don't look at me like that," he said. "Don't do that to me. Don't stare at me like that, and not say anything!"

But Tatl did as she pleased, which was exactly what he didn't want her to do. She sat down on the ground, and waited.

"I waited! I waited, too, for years, for someone to come for me. I know what that is like! I know! And she did! She, she did! She came for me, after ten years! Finally, she came for me! But then, she, she—!"

"She left," said Tatl. "And here you are."

He buried his fingers in his hair. Everything felt too close. The town walls were closing in on him, and the heavens above threatened to crush him. He covered his eyes like he might close it all out, and then squeezed his temples when a sharp pain ran through his skull and his heavy breathing threatened to toss out the contents of his stomach.

After a minute, he managed to swallow a mouthful of air and keep it down.

"...I've done the same thing, though. I've left, and failed to come back for someone before the end," he said. "I have failed so many times."

Tatl swallowed, thickly. "Is someone waiting for you now?"

He looked at her, then, and took the knee.

"Someone is waiting," he said. "Someone else. Someone kind and naive." The words tasted bitter in his mouth. "I said goodbye and told her not to. But she is waiting anyway. She is waiting in vain."

"Why?" said Tatl.

"I refuse to hate her. I refuse to hate the princess. But I never," he said, and the truth burned him like acid, "I never want to see her again."

Tatl's wings fluttered, once. "You're cold."

"I am cold," he echoed. The irony of the statement was outrageous. He felt like he was being boiled alive inside, constantly. "Do you forgive the Skull Kid?"

Tatl's frown grew teeth, and she bristled. "You're frigid."

"Do you?" he pried.

Tatl's chest rose and fell like a hummingbird's wing as she came to her full height, defiant.

"Anju," she said, "wants to find Kafei. Kafei," she held out her hand, "had something he wanted to tell her. Give me the letter."

"This isn't ours to open," he said.

"Give me the letter," Tatl repeated. "You'll never let this go until you do this."

"Neither will you," he said.

She glowed fiercely, her hand outstretched. "Give me that letter."

"What will you do?"

She sneered. "Fix it," she said. "We're going to fix it. So shut up and put on one of your masks and make yourself halfway presentable. Your face is swelling, and it makes you look even more monstrous than usual." She curled her fingers to her palm, and then away from it. "Give me that letter."


	9. Deku Mask

The trees of the Woods grew up all around him and into the heavens like they had no end, only a beginning, and the beginning was the earth itself. The wet of the dirt and grass blossomed in his nose and stuck while the slow, sweet decline of rot and the harsh, pungent run of crystallizing sap plagued the trees in equal measure.

A girl with hair the color of spring leaves sat on a stump as big as she was, as big as he was, as big as they were together, shoulder to shoulder. She played her ocarina loudly and clearly with a melody he knew well. Vines grew around her ankles and tied her to the earth.

When she finished her song, she threw back her head and laughed. But the vines did not let go of her, and the slow, sweet decline of rot and the harsh, pungent run of crystallizing sap plagued their leaves in equal measure.

He mimicked her on his ocarina, and she played back to him like the performance was a conversation. Fairies and the ephemeral static of magic buzzed and twinkled in the soft fog tugging at their feet. Nobody else was around, besides the old bones of the marble temple peeking down at them from behind their backs. In front of them was a labyrinth. Once, it upheld a garden of roses and housed a staff of rose-scented servants with clippers and watering cans in their hands. Now, the marble quarters had no roof and the flowers had no blooms.

He could see them if he thought hard enough about them. They were red and white. He could see them through the screen of trees and moss, if he thought hard enough, but they were not there. It was only Woods overgrown with all the time and patience in the world. The slow, sweet decline of rot and the harsh, pungent run of crystallizing sap plagued the grove in equal measure.

He looked to his left, at his teacher and friend, and his most beloved. She was not there.

He looked down at his hands. They were too large, and his feet were too far away from his eyes. He noticed the skeletons buried in the moss beneath his feet for the first time, and how the bead of light buried in their eye sockets watched him with careful caution. The slow, sweet decline of rot and the harsh, pungent run of crystallizing sap plagued them in equal measure.

They had been there long enough to lose their color, and long enough to come alive again when something else took root inside of them like a parasite. They would not leave. They would never leave. They were not children, they were not divine, and they were not suitable for the Woods, so the Woods made them suitable. They had been there long enough to lose their regrets, and long enough to come alive again when the Woods finished stripping them of what they were before.

Then, he was walking through the Woods on the back of his horse. He was Lost. He called through the towers of trees and craned his head around to see if he could find a beginning or an end east or west of him. He found only fog and bark and vines and moss, and the smell of rot and sap. The slow, sweet decline of rot and the harsh, pungent run of crystallizing sap plagued the trees in equal measure.

He lost his horse, and fell down a hole in the corpse of a giant tree. He lost a lot of things. He fell forever and ever, through visions of faces and faces and faces. A clock's. A man's. A Zora's. A Goron's. He hit the bottom. It was wet. The slow, sweet decline of rot and the harsh, pungent run of crystallizing sap plagued him in equal measure.

A demon peered into his mind. They sucked him out of it, and into something new. They gave him flesh of wood and skin of bark. They encased his eyes in amber and commanded his hair sprout leaves that changed with the seasons. They said, "You can stay looking like that forever," and they meant it. He could stay looking like that forever. He could finally stay a child forever, but only if he became something other than what he was. This was the demon's price. This new body was someone else's. He could hear them speak out in wordless anger at his presence inside it. This new body was not his.

His real body was still down there at the bottom of the hole, still cradled in the roots of a tree and resting in soil, and not breathing. The slow, sweet decline of rot and the harsh, pungent run of crystallizing sap plagued it in equal measure.

The Woods would take care of it. The Woods would absorb his regrets. The Woods would find a way beneath his false face, pry it off and turn it to dust, and give him forever as what he really was. They would. The Woods had time. The slow, sweet decline of rot and the harsh, pungent run of crystallizing sap plagued eternity in equal measure. The Woods were the beginning and the end. They destroyed the life they created, and preserved it. The Woods reduced the world to raw dirt and crafted perfect gemstones as it saw fit. The slow, sweet decline of rot and the harsh, pungent run of crystallizing sap plagued time in equal measure.

He would rise again from this place in three days.

"Hey," said Tatl, and suddenly he was painfully aware of the sunlight streaming in through the wooden slats of the barn wall, and the halo of dust emanating off the pile of hay cradling his head.

"You were having a nightmare," said Tatl. "Got on my nerves."

"Hn," he said. His mouth was dry. His brow was not.

"You've slept for three hours. It's barely five," she said. "If you feel up to it, go over to the house. I'm sure Cremia'll feed you."

"Why are we here?" he asked.

"Because Cremia is Anju and Kafei's friend. She knows more about them," Tatl said. "We're gathering information."

"No," he clarified. "Why are we here? Why did the Woods lead us to Termina, to this place?"

Tatl opened her mouth, and then shut it with an offended snap.

"W-well, this is a fine time to wax philosophical, isn't it? Don't you have five million other things to do instead of sit there and think about crap like that? Don't you?!" Tatl crossed her arms and huffed. Her light dimmed for an instant, and then glowed brighter. "Don't ask me stuff like that. You're so stupid."

She turned away. "I don't know, so don't ask me stuff like that. It's stupid. I don't want to talk about it."


	10. Romani's Mask

Cremia's blouse was rough and undyed, but underneath it she smelled like cows and lavender. She was warm, and the sensation of her arms around him filled him with something he couldn't name.

"Thank you," Cremia said. "Thank you for helping us. Thank you for listening to me talk about my father, and my friend Anju. I know it really doesn't matter, since everything is going to be over soon, but it really… it really means a lot to me. Thank you."

They stood beneath the stars and the prying eyes of the moon, and breathed one another in.

He realized that, with one exception, no one had ever held him like this.

"Thank you so much," Cremia repeated. Her arms shook, but her grip was steady.

They stayed that way for more than ten seconds, and more than twenty, but she released him before he realized that he should put his arms around her. When they parted, she was smiling.

"I have something else for you, too," she said. "I was going to give it to my sister, but, well. I think it's more fitting for you to have it."

She hurried to her covered wagon and pulled something out. A mask made of cowhide.

A mask made to look like a cow, actually. Pink linen covered the nose and snout, and the horns were lacquered wood. It tied beneath the chin like a child's bonnet.

"I know it looks ridiculous," she said, "but it's a symbol of maturity. If you have that, it means you're recognized as an adult and not a child anymore."

The warm, calm feeling from a moment ago soured in his soul. He looked down at the mask and bit back the urge to throw it back in her face. Instead, he balled the mask in his hands and pushed it against his chest, like what he did with his hands could correlate with what he was doing with the fire building in his stomach.

"Be safe," he said to Cremia. "It's dark at night. Romani is waiting for you."

"Yes," said Cremia. "She is, isn't she? And you, well," she took a step back towards her wagon, but failed to turn away. "Please be safe as well, on your way back to whoever is waiting for you."

He ducked his head. The cowhide mask's eyes peered out from between his torturous fingers in pained fright.

"Of course," he said. "Of course."

Cremia took her seat, and looked down at him one last time. "Maybe," she said, "I'll see you at the Carnival, after my friend's wedding." Her hands trembled on the reins.

"At their wedding," he said, like an echo.

Cremia smiled with watery eyes. "Yes. They're going to get married right here, just after dawn- right where we stand. It's the East, in the eyes of our ancestors." She turned to face the field behind her, and the jagged canyon walls carving out great black shadows in the night sky. "They're going to watch the sun as it rises. They're going to greet the morning together."

"Of course," he said.

"I'll see you then," said Cremia. "I look forward to it."

"I'll see you," he said.

Then, with a flick of the reigns, she was off and away into the night of the second day. Her lantern bathed the canvas top of her wagon in soft firelight, and he watched until the wagon was nothing more than a speck floating in the darkness.

Tatl appeared from beneath his hat and flew out to face him.

"Well, well. Help out a sad single girl, and suddenly you're all grown up now. That's what it takes to be a man, huh?"

"She meant it as a kindness," he said.

"So, how did you feel about coaxing those chicks into adulthood, down at the ranch? About playing a tune to gather up the wee infants and deliver them to cockdom come?"

"Grog saw it as a kindness," he repeated, through gritted teeth.

"And what did you think of it, not-Kokiri?" Tatl said.

He stared at her through the darkness. The cowhide mask in his hands watched them both with terrified eyes. No grass grew on this side of Clock Town, and no cicadas nested here. It was eerily quiet, save the faint, airy hiss of the creatures of the canyon that gathered along the walls at night.

Tatl clicked her tongue. "It's incredible," she said, "how everyone we meet manages to say the last thing you want to hear."

He glared at her, but that wasn't fair. Tatl was on his side, now, or as close to it as someone like her could get. He turned to face the moon instead.

Its angry, ringed eyes stared back, but with a wider field of vision than just him alone. The moon had its eyes on the entirety of Termina, just like his heart cried out in anger at something much larger than a lone fairy, a princess, an evil man, or the person he loved more than anything.

"They're to greet the morning together," he said. "Kafei, and Anju. That was their plan."

"It was before Kafei went drinking, apparently, according to the diary he left lying around in his room," said Tatl. She huffed. "I can see why Aroma hangs around that bar by the Eastern gate in the end, when she realizes it's unfixable. She keeps thinking they'll show up and she'll catch 'em."

"Yeah."

Tatl crossed her arms and gestured to the mask with a tilt of her head. "Well? What're you waiting for? Put that thing on and let's go ask around in the bar. It'll get us in, won't it?"

"It's a dead end," he said. "This whole thing was a waste of time. We did not learn anything. We need to confront Kafei directly."

Tatl grinned. "That's just it. You're not ready to do that just yet."

"There's only so much time we can waste, Tatl."

"Oh?" said Tatl, bobbing over his head and luring him into the mouth of the immense eastern gate. "Oh, really? You, with the infinite possibilities of three days, are telling me you're getting antsy?"

He didn't retort, but the cowhide mask felt his wrath.

Tatl's smile dropped. "Alright. Alright, look. It's going to be alright. I promise. We're going to get through this, you and me, and we're not even going to make ourselves miserable about it one hundred percent of the time. Okay?"

"Don't talk to me like that," he said. His throat felt thick, and his voice sounded like it.

Tatl drew back into the gate even more, and lured him to take a step toward her and closer to Clock Town.

"Talk to you like what?" she asked.

He narrowed his eyes, but he took another step towards her. "I know what you are doing. Don't."

"I'm not doing anything," Tatl said.

"You're cruel," he said. He thought she had understood. He thought she knew enough, now. He wiped at his nose and tried to stop his shoulders from shaking. "You're the cruelest fairy I've ever met."

"And you're the most pathetic monster I've ever met," she countered. "Come on. It's dangerous out here. Let's go back into the town. Maybe after this, we'll go see Anju's granny again, or go get something to eat that's better than the Stock Pot Inn gruel you keep insisting on. Come on."

He paused and ground his teeth, and then bit back every obstinate retort he had in him, but he did as Tatl asked and let her light lead him back into town, like the town walls were trees, he was a Kokiri, and she really was his guardian fairy.


	11. Postman's Hat

"Ten," he said, with a bored, premeditated certainty.

The Postman looked down at his stopwatch, and let his thin eyes grow wide within their sockets. His jaw dropped open and his eyebrows shot up into his hairline.

"Ten seconds exactly," he said. "Ten seconds exactly! But how? How did you know?! How do you always know?!" His thin legs kicked against his checkered comforter and his flat feet flopped in disbelief at the end of his ankles. "You're so young, and you don't even have a schedule! How can you do this?! I have trained all my life to run like clockwork, and yet! And yet! Are you a human watch?! Is there a timepiece in your head instead of a brain?!"

"No," he said. It wasn't in his head; he felt time in his heart like it was the blood in his veins. He'd die if it wasn't always burrowing through him instant by instant. It was torture. It was necessary. He had a schedule so vast and so intricate that it might shatter the Postman's mind if he knew; the Postman delivered mail, but he was delivering all of Termina. He was delivering a man to his fiancé.

"I've done what you asked," he said. "It's your turn to hold up your end of the bargain."

The Postman threw himself back on his bed and slammed his fists against his pillow. "No! No! This isn't fair! I'll never tell you where Kafei is! You must have cheated!"

"We had a deal," he said. "You said if I could count the seconds as they were exactly, you'd tell me where he is. I've done it five times, now, in different increments."

"No!"

The Postman lived, ate, and slept in the farthest corner of the post office. Cubbies lined the far wall across from his bed with packages and papers in bright and orderly stacks divided between them like candies divided between children. Missed deliveries, according to the tickets stuck to the top of each one. The Postman felt the need to organize and store them anyway in the hope that, perhaps, the people would return and allow his deliveries to resume as scheduled. In fact, the Postman had wrapped each package in anticipation of the town's return; rolls of leftover colored paper flanked the mailboxes in neat bins, just next to the excruciatingly detailed, meticulously annotated calendar on the wall.

He had so much to give, but nobody left to receive it. They both did.

"Kafei's hiding spot is a secret!" insisted the Postman. "We never give away the personal information of our patrons! Never!"

He was loyal, too. They both were.

"We had a deal," he repeated.

"You've got to be kidding me," muttered Tatl from her place beneath his hat.

"I don't caaaaare!" wailed the Postman. "My pride as Postman is more important! I'll never let down my Postmistress, and I'll never let down her son! Neveeeer!" The Postman threw his finger at the wall, where a photo of Madam Aroma smiled beatifically at the two of them through layers of makeup and framing glass. "I'll never betray her!"

"We're looking for Kafei on your Postmistress' request," he said. "If you deny us, you deny her."

The Postman's hollering stopped in his throat as suddenly as snuffing out a candle. His pinhole eyes boggled at his guest, then the photograph on the wall, and finally his Postman's Hat hanging on a peg in the corner of the room. He looked between the three options several more times with a quivering lower lip and liberally running nose.

"Bwaaaaaargh!" he hollered, and threw himself on the bed. His hands and feet beat out a syncopated rhythm against his bedclothes. "I can't! I can't! I can't do this! You're lying! You're lying! There's no way my Postmistress sent you! It cannot beeeeeeeee!"

Tatl crawled along his crown and down to his ear like a giant tick rifling through his hair. The sensation made his skin crawl. She lifted the edge of the Bunny Hood and whispered to him.

"Anju's letter," she said. "Just give it to him and follow behind him when he delivers it. We'll find out where he is that way."

He stalled. "Stop acting like a child," he told the Postman.

"Like you're one to talk," argued Tatl.

He was fully aware of how ridiculous he looked with the long ears of the Bunny Hood swinging over his head. He lifted his chin and tried to look more demanding. The ears probably dashed his efforts. "Hold up your end of the bargain," he said.

Tatl snarled. "When Anju said to deliver the letter, she didn't say it had to be _by your hand_. It just has to get to Kafei somehow!"

Asking Anju for this letter, again, asking with a lump in his throat made from all of his secrets, had almost killed him. He had to wear another face in order to do it. She had looked so surprised, and so hopeful. Last time, he had allowed the Postman to deliver her message, and last time, Kafei had not come.

He had not come. Anju waited for him until the end of the world, and he had not come.

What if the Postman was the reason why? He couldn't trust this to anyone else. He couldn't. Not now. He couldn't let this fail again.

"Don't be proud. You said you were ready to face this- and part of that means getting over yourself when it doesn't go your way," Tatl whispered.

He swiped a hand by his ear and poked her back inside of his hat.

She popped right back out.

"Spoiled, arrogant little brat," she hissed, and pinched his earlobe. "Don't criticize the Postman if you aren't any better. I know what you're thinking."

He glared at the Postman, since he couldn't look at Tatl herself.

"Stop sniveling and give it over," he said.

"Take your own advice," Tatl said.

"No!" the Postman wailed. "You can't make me!"

"Not everything happens like you want it to just because you want it to," Tatl said. "There is no amount of time, magic, or power in this world that'll ever make that so. You just have to try, and then try again. That's just how it is."

"I don't have to give you anything!" moaned the Postman. "Cheater! Sneak! Why should you know everything?!"

"You only have so much time," Tatl urged. "Your window of today will close soon if you aren't careful, and we'll have to do this all over again."

He wasn't used to asking others for their help and trusting them to actually do it. In fact, in his experience, the plans of others often sent him spiraling in cycles of destruction and chaos.

"Are you prepared to go through this every time, even though you don't have to?" the fairy asked. "Are you?"

Tatl's preaching was absolutely correct, and absolutely redundant. He decided that he surely must hate her almost as much as she hated him.

He reached into his tunic and pulled out Anju's letter right in the middle of the Postman's wailing fit. It felt like he was ripping out his own heart.

"Fine," he said. "If you can't tell me where he is, can you do your job and deliver this for me, instead?"

The envelope was burgundy and gold, just like Anju's hair in the candlelight. He held it out with cautious hands, like he was afraid it might dissolve into dust and nothingness if he let it go.

The Postman sat up, his tirade suddenly forgotten. "...Huh? A letter? This is about a delivery?"

"Yes," he said.

"Ah!" the Postman said. "Yah! Of course I can! Why didn't you say you had mail?!" He reared back, hopped up from his bed, and snatched Anju's letter from the offered hand like he had every right in the world to it. He plucked the letter away like a weed from the grass, like the wind snatching away dandelion fluff.

His fingers burned where the paper left them. He felt his hand twitch, and panic seize his heart.

Then, the Postman handed it back. "Yah. Take it to a mailbox, and I will pick it up and deliver it as scheduled." He nodded. "Yah."

"What?!" Tatl hissed.

"I need you to deliver this today. _Now_ ," he said.

"Sorry!" said the Postman. "Regular mail follows regular protocols. Put it in the mailbox, and I promise you I will pick it up and deliver it posthaste, just as it says on my schedule."

"I don't have time for that!" he said.

"Nonsense!" said the Postman. "There is always time to do things the right way. That is why we have protocols. That is why we have schedules!"

"This concerns your Postmistress! This is to help Aroma and Anju!" he urged. "This is of the utmost priority!"

The Postman blinked. "Priority? No, no. That is not priority mail. That is regular mail. If it were priority mail, this would be a different story." His head bobbled on his thin neck. "But that is regular mail. It goes in the postbox. I will not deliver that unless it comes to me through the proper channels. Yah."

A great panic bloomed inside of his chest and took hold. He felt something inside of himself seize, and his breathing grew labored. It was like he could feel the weight of the packages lining the wall pressing down upon him all at once. There were so many, and they had nowhere to go and nobody to take them.

His fingers bit into the envelope. The paper crumpled in his hand.

Tatl noticed. "You're going to tear it," she said. "Calm down. We'll repeat the cycle, put it in the postbox, and follow him. We haven't lost yet."

"Tomorrow is the third day," he said. "Tomorrow is the third and final day."

The Postman's thin mouth stretched into an even tighter line. "Tomorrow is a workday."

"The moon is going to fall," he said. "You understand that. Everyone will be gone, because the moon is going to fall. There will be nobody to receive this."

The Postman's mouth trembled. "Tomorrow is a workday. It is not on my schedule to leave. I will pick up and deliver the mail as scheduled."

"But tomorrow is-!" he said.

"A workday," the Postman finished. "Yah. Tomorrow is a workday. It is written on the schedule. I cannot leave." He swallowed. "I have deliveries to make. You see? And you have a letter for me, too. You have something to say to someone before the end, don't you?"

He forgot about the letter in his outstretched hand, and so let it hang there like the Postman's Hat from the wall, let it hang like the silence around them.

"Messages should be sent properly. I see to it that they are sent properly, all the way until the end. It is my job."

The clock on the wall clicked with a dedicated, but haggard, rhythm.

"I cannot leave. I have a schedule. A child without responsibilities like you," the Postman finally said, looking down at the bedspread, "would not understand."

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

He returned to the Stock Pot Inn that night with every intention of groveling for forgiveness from Anju in her room on the second floor, but he only made it as far as the first floor bathroom. He threw Anju's crumpled letter into the toilet, and the contents of his stomach- food Anju had made for him- followed soon after.

"I'm sorry," said Tatl.

She was the only light in the cramped room. If he wasn't a child, his elbows would touch the walls as he braced himself.

"Are you still sure you don't want to, just, you know, give up?" she asked. "There's no shame in admitting you can't handle this, or taking a break."

"No." He pulled his face from the seat and wiped his mouth. His tongue was noxious in his mouth, much like he felt noxious in his skin. " _Again_ ," he said. "Again."

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

 **Author's Note: Thank you so much for reading this angst. I hope it isn't too heavy and is still enjoyable to you. I appreciate all of your time and feedback!**


	12. Mask of Truth

Afternoon of the Second Day. Forty hours remained.

Clock Town's stone streets were heavy with the humidity of a storm about to happen- the same storm the town had seen so many times before, and. The moisture pressed against his hair and clothes, and stuck on his skin like sweat. Tatl fanned her wings from her perch on his shoulder like she was trying to shake the sticky, crushing atmosphere from her person like a cloud of gnats.

In front of them, the Postman scurried and hurried along on his postal route at a steady clip. Why he chose to travel the full length of his route even when he had only one letter, none could say, but it seemed fitting that he would take the time to do things properly. He had not noticed he was being followed.

It probably wasn't on his schedule to notice.

"So," said Tatl, "are you really going to follow the Postman all day with that freaky thing on your face? I mean, I know this is Termina, but that one's unsettling, even for a place like this."

"I feel most comfortable with this mask," he said to Tatl.

The Mask of Truth was one he held so long ago, and yet also not so long ago, back when he was in Hyrule. The Happy Mask Salesman himself had given him one to use.

The Salesman had called it a frightening mask. He still couldn't understand why. Out of all the masks in his collection, the Salesman found this one the most frightening. Foolishness. The Mask of Truth was the most comforting.

"I can't believe you hid behind that thing throughout your entire talk with Anju last night," she said. "You hid from the sun behind that thing. Did you ever take it off?"

"I couldn't face Anju so soon without a barrier," he admitted.

"Are you going to be able to face Kafei?" Tatl asked. "Because, you know, if you can't, we have other things to do, and other days to try for this."

"No. I have to do this," he said. "I have to."

Tatl clicked her tongue. "No, you don't."

"I do."

"You don't."

"I said I would, and so now, I will." He turned his head to peer at her.

Tatl wrinkled her nose like he was a soured puddle of milk. Then, she sighed.

"I'm going to save your brother, too," he said.

Tatl pushed a puff of air out from her top lip, and then wiped her face. The atmosphere above them both was oppressive and unpleasant, and it dragged even her rapier wit and outraged impatience down to the ground. She glanced over her shoulder at him, and looked his mask up and down with her eyes.

"What does that thing even do, anyway?"

"What?"

"That mask. The guy you got it from said it lets you talk to animals?"

They found it inside a temple of old Ikana, one with walls of gold and accents of lapis lazuli studded beneath a veil of cobwebs. The grotesque, abandoned hive of some monstrous insect insulated the temple from the rancid water and greedy mud of the swamp to the south, but beneath the facade, at the core of the nest, a festering evil quietly skittered in the darkness and ensnared anything that dared come near.

Spiders decorated the doors, spiders crawled on the ceiling, and spiders sucked dry the presence of any god that might have once lived in the house with them. They consumed it.

He hated spiders.

The man inside the house had become a spider, too, and the only thing that allowed him to see into the hearts and minds of his two saviors was the Mask of Truth hanging over his eight terrified eyes. Without it, he would've tried to hide, failed, and been cleaved neatly in two- still cursed with eight legs- and left to rot for the last three days of Termina before he could utter a word out from his mandibles.

"Yes. It can let you talk to animals, in a manner of speaking."

Tatl raised her eyebrows and waited. "In a manner of speaking?"

"Really, it allows the animal to speak with you."

"And?" she prompted.

"And?"

The Postman descended the stairway connecting the Eastern and Southern neighborhoods. He strolled after him, and glanced at the moon and Clock Tower as they came into view, unobstructed. The Postman made a beeline for the stairs to the laundry pool, where Kafei had escaped to not twenty-four hours ago in a different set of days. Thunder rumbled in the distance.

Was Kafei really at the laundry pool all of this time? Had he been right here the whole time, and not just that sliver of an hour on the first day?! The sky growled, again.

"Yeah. _And?_ " Tatl repeated.

He turned back to her. "What was the question, again?"

Tatl glared. "The mask. What does it _do?_ "

The Mask of Truth was a source of conflict and comfort every time he wore it. When he was younger, the other Kokiri spoke mean words to his face with little to no obfuscation. The children just hated him. He had no fairy, and they hated him. It was that simple.

Outside of the forest, he found that people liked to lie about their desires and feelings. Anything they said could be true, or nothing could be true, or it could be true but for different reasons than what the people said. Everything outside of the forest was a riddle and a threat.

The Mask of Truth cut through all of it. It cracked open the hearts and minds of the people on its other side, and it sucked out any falsehoods like blood from a corpse. It consumed them. It revealed the true nature of people. It revealed the desires of animals. It brought forth secrets out of even stones, if they had any to give.

"The Mask of Truth tells me secrets," he said.

"So, it talks to you?" Tatl asked.

"No. Well, yes. But, no. Not really. It helps me talk to other people."

"What?"

"Yes."

" _What?!_ "

The stairs to the laundry pool cut into the air at an easy angle, and then turned into a flat dirt path that changed direction to adhere to the wall outlining the circumference of Clock Town.

The laundry pool itself was a pocket of water from the town's irrigation system making its last stop before draining out into Termina field. A single tree leaned out over the wide, sluggish stream of water, and a clump of wildflowers and pampas danced in a ring around its roots to the tune of the huge frog squatting among them. A wooden walkway hung to the town wall and crossed over the pool to the thin strip of fortified path on the other side. At the end was a locked door and a crooked, weathered sign for the seedy Curiosity Shop. The establishment's front door was in the bottom corner of Clock Town's western neighborhood, right on the other side of the laundry pool wall.

He'd been in the shop before. It sold a collection of baubles united only in their suspicious circumstances: snake oil, exotic animal corpses, shrunken heads, holy bones, relics of old Ikana with curses apparent on their painted faces, trinkets dripping with dust and superstition, and furniture and clothing with conveniently dead past owners and no good excuse to appear in a hole-in-the-wall pawn shop. The man who ran the register did so by night, when his no-good, part-time, teen-something, slacker employee busied himself with a whole lot of nothing at the counter of his other, more credible trading post farther up the road.

Of course, both the Merchant's night business and day job were fronts for one another. The only honest and upfront constant in the last road of the western neighborhood was the Bomb Shop jammed right between the Curiosity Shop and Trading Post, and it was liable to go up in smoke at any given time.

"C'mon," said Tatl. "Give me a straight answer."

"It's hard to explain what this mask does," he said.

"Yeah, I figured based on how you're clamming up tighter than usual over it. I'm not asking about that anymore. I want to know if you're going to be able to keep it together for this."

"...Yeah." There's a reason he kept the Mask of Truth all to himself. It only worked one way. It was one of the things he liked about it.

Tatl shifted on his shoulder. "I'm serious. It's not just some distant event on our repetitive, indefinite, infinite calendar anymore. Maybe not this time, but if you're determined to keep doing this, you're eventually going to see Kafei, _again_ , face-to-face, and I need you to not beat him bloody this time, or lose your mind and do something drastic to yourself. I need you _functional_. Do you understand me?"

The Postman came to a stop right where the dirt path met the wooden walkway. He plucked his hat from his head and wiped the sweat and condensation of the atmosphere from his brow, and then slapped the old bronze bell hanging from the wooden post jutting up out of the slow water. The sign above it said, in crude, carved letters: Curiosity Shop - NO SOLICITORS!

The bell's clatter exploded outwards and bounced off the painted Clock Town walls, off the surface of the water, and hit his eardrums with a merciless energy. If any dead were sleeping beneath their feet, like the Gibdo in Ikana Canyon, or the fallen soldiers in the fields of Hyrule, they would be startled out of slumber in an instant and shrieking through the town.

" _Why_?" lamented Tatl, when the cacophony settled down. "The pressure on my head on the second day is always bad enough as it is in this stupid town without that kind of nonsense!"

He lifted the edge of the Mask of Truth to massage his temples, and had a comment for Tatl right on the tip of his tongue, but it dissolved when he looked across the laundry pool and saw the Curiosity Shop's back door standing wide open. A boy of about ten or eleven held the doorknob, and his yellow fox mask took in the Postman with black, slitted eyes.

"He really was here," said Tatl, her mouth agape. "He was right here. The whole time."

The whole time.

The sky sent down a stream of lightning with a belated crack. The rain followed, slowly, hesitantly, one drop at a time.

Kafei looked up at the sky, startled, and then covered his head and hurried down the path towards the Postman, and towards the burgundy and gold letter held in his hand.

"W-we've," said Tatl, "We've got to make a decision." Her fingers buried into his collar, and then his skin. "If you want to talk to him, that's fine, but if you want to do it this cycle, you've got to, ah, you've got to, to be sure. You've got to be sure you're able to do this. You've got to-!"

Meanwhile, Kafei took the letter from the Postman and slid it out of its envelope. He bent over it to shield it from the cautious rain, and started on the first few words. The gold embellishments around the edges glittered like fire, like Anju's hair and eyes in low light.

His body started moving without him. The corners of his vision turned white. His feet followed the path one step at a time without question.

Tatl started when his body lurched forward with the first few steps, and then flew up into his hat like she could use his hair to control him by pulling it like reigns.

"What are you doing?!" she hissed. "What are you planning?! You can't just do everything on impulse! What are you thinking?! Are you going to attack him?! _What are you doing?!_ "

Tatl couldn't see him beyond the Mask of Truth's one eye. She couldn't know what he was thinking, when he was safe behind the mask. And, admittedly, neither could he.

He drew closer, and soon he could see the tiny, stitched eyes of the rabbit on the Postman's red backpack, and those of Kafei's mask broke from the letter and settled squarely on him.

They stared at one another through their masks, for not the first time, and surely not for the last. The other boy was so close, he didn't even need his full reach to thrust out his hands and strangle him. But, strangely, he didn't.

And, inexplicably, Kafei nodded at him like he knew him.

Then, the sky let loose with a horrible gust of wind and open deluge, and Kafei led his two seekers into the shelter of the Curiosity Shop's back room. They followed his lead without a word, and let the rain pelting against them and the dirt at their feet fill the silence.

It was a distance of maybe twenty feet at most, but the time it took to cross it was a complete blur.

The door was old, ratty wood and smeared, misty glass on the outside, but the inside was fortified metal. Kafei pulled it shut and slid the first of five locks, the one closest to his eye level, shut.

They were at the end of a ramped hallway. Kafei still held Anju's letter in his hand, and pored over it again as he turned his back and made his way along the hall. His back cut out a dark shape against the dim firelight washing over the walls.

Tatl's fingers buried into her partner's scalp like a set of desperate prods, but she wasn't conjuring forth anything worthwhile to say, either. Dumbly, numbly, they followed their masked host down the hall until it emptied them out into a single, cramped room. Kafei stood in the corner and read to himself while the seconds ticked ever onwards.

Until he turned around.

"Green hat. Green clothes," Kafei said. "Anju wrote about you in her letter."

Green hat. Green clothes. Anju wrote about him in her letter, even though she did not even know his name. Now, he was standing in the tiny back room of the Clock Town Curiosity Shop with a single lantern dangling over his head and dimly illuminating everything he dared reveal about himself: small body, clenched fists, impossible silence, expressionless mask, green hat, green clothes.

"Can you," Kafei asked, just as inscrutable from behind his yellow mask, "keep a secret?"

Could he keep a secret? Could he? Could he keep a secret? Does it count if he told everyone, screamed it from the rafters, and then pulled back the time it took him to speak like dust under a rug, so nobody would know that it happened but him? Did that count? Could he keep a secret? Could he keep himself- the Hero who slipped through time and memory- a secret? He had no name. He had no history. Nobody knew him but a forest of children who didn't believe in him, six sages who didn't exist here, there, or anywhere, a princess he wouldn't speak to, and a fairy who wouldn't speak to him.

Them, and Tatl.

He was a secret. It crushed him to keep himself to himself, but he could never speak of it. He fit right in with the baubles and mysteries of the Curiosity Shop. If he sat on the shelf with the other goods, it might be the first place he ever truly fit in.

Could he keep another secret? Could he keep another secret to everybody?

The room was so cramped that they barely had the space for another person between them. He watched the other boy from behind the Mask of Truth's singular eye and said nothing, like the mask's lacquered exterior was an impregnable buffer even in such close quarters.

Tatl revealed herself from beneath his green hat when the answer didn't come fast enough. "Yes," she said.

Kafei peered at her from behind slitted, painted eyes, and then nodded. "Anju trusted you. I shall also trust you." He put his hand over his mask.

"I," he said, removing his fox mask, "am Kafei."

And so he was.

His face- his real face- would be handsome on an adult man, but as a child, his features were too full and too dark for his soft face and small body. His posture betrayed an air of authority too developed for a boy of ten, and his manners were too reserved and self-contained to belong to a child. Everything about him seemed to fit wrong.

The lantern's light flickered against the walls of the cramped room, and the sides of the dusty crates butting up against Kafei's oversized cot. The uneven table squeezed in next to it kept quiet beneath the blanket of stationary spread over its surface to hide it from prying eyes. The clock on the wall just above it turned with caution, like it was afraid it might hit something or someone every time it rotated its gears. On the wall closest to them, just above their heads, a single patinated copper mask grinned at them with empty eyes and a toothless, knowing smile.

None of them said anything until Tatl cleared her throat.

Behind the Mask of Truth, he felt his teeth grinding out the words to a litany of accusations, but he bit them back.

"The Kafei we're looking for is an adult," she said. "When I look at you, I only see a child."

Kafei almost smiled, _almost_ , almost like he knew something more than that. Almost, like the mask on the wall. But he couldn't know anything about who they were, or where his misfortune came from.

But if, somehow, he did...

"I was turned into this by a strange imp wearing a mask," Kafei said. "But I'm not hiding because I look this way."

How dare he. How dare he hide. His words were the truth, but still. How dare he.

"I promised Anju that I would greet her on the eve of the Carnival- the eve of our wedding- with my wedding mask."

Except, he hadn't. He hadn't. How _dare_ he.

"But it," Kafei snarled, "it was stolen. My wedding mask was stolen."

Kafei put something so stupid as _that_ over Anju. Behind the Mask of Truth, he felt his jaw locking and his stomach churning, and a blanket of haze clouding over his vision. His heart hammered in his ears as the agonizingly precise length of every second again gripped him with horrifying precision.

Tatl fluttered directly in front of his face with blinding speed.

"Yeah, and you ran away," she said to Kafei. "Because the shame of losing something negates the responsibility of telling the people who care about you that you're safe. Sure."

His eyes followed Tatl in surprise.

Kafei blinked. "Excuse me?"

"You're just careless." Tatl jerked a thumb over her shoulder. "Like my partner."

 _Careless?_ _He_ was careless? She dared compare him to Kafei?

Kafei looked between the two of them.

Tatl shrugged.

He seethed.

Kafei stepped forwards until he was nose-to-nose with Tatl, which put him even closer to her masked counterpart. "No," insisted Kafei. "I _didn't_ lose it, and not then. Not that night. No. I was targeted because of what I had become."

Kafei's words were true, but his blood still boiled beneath his skin.

"Do you not understand?" Kafei asked. "It was taken from me because I was turned into this- this _form!_ I went to try and solve this problem, and because of it, when that prancing man ripped the mask from my grasp, I _couldn't_ fight him off, I couldn't reach to strike back, and the guards stopped me from pursuing him out of the town gate because I look like a child."

An excuse. That's all it was. An excuse. He knew better than anyone that what you were- what you looked like- was impermanent. It was a lie. Kafei wasn't persistent enough to accept that he could never accept himself as he was. This wasn't about him; it was about the promise he made to Anju.

Except, the Mask of Truth revealed the same sentiments in Kafei's heart.

"Sorry," said Tatl, oblivious. "I don't see how that's important to the big picture. You're making this about you when it needs to be a little more about her."

Kafei clenched his teeth. "I cannot show myself to her as I am: empty-handed. You say my absence is careless? _No_. An inability to follow through on a promise- _that_ is careless. I said I would do something, and I intend to do it. There is nothing more important to me. Nothing. I will be there."

He found that he couldn't say anything, even with Kafei breathing in his face. He couldn't say anything above the barely-there whisper of air moving between his lips as they formed words without sound.

" _I hate you,"_ he tried, but it was only a ghost in the still air.

Tatl's face twitched. She glanced at her partner from the corner of her eye, like she could see he was looking at her through that mask. Her mouth curled down at the edge like she'd heard him.

So then, Tatl said, with her eyes on the Mask of Truth, "I pity you."

She meant it. He had no idea how to take it. The clock on the wall clattered forwards as the hour changed.

Kafei's mouth pulled into a tight, wrinkled frown. He turned to face the Mask of Truth, too, and then pulled something from the collar of his shirt.

It was a pendant of amethyst, yellow-gold, and silver-white. He'd seen this type of metalwork before- from the smithy in the northern mountains, at the foot of Snowhead. This was their work. It had the same geometric motifs as the murals and brooches passed down from old Ikana.

"Please give this to Anju," Kafei said. "She'll know what it means. Tell her to wait for me. I will be there."

Tatl narrowed her eyes. Her light caught on the edges of the pendant, and the edges of Kafei's face. "Why should we, huh? How do we know you're not full of crap?"

Kafei bristled. "I assure you, I will get my mask back, and I will greet my beloved. Properly."

"What if we don't believe you?" Tatl looked over her shoulder at her partner and his inscrutable mask.

"I will be there," said Kafei, pendant still in his hand. "There is nothing more important to me than this. Nothing."

Behind the mask, he was reeling. Kafei's words were honest. They were dedicated. It threw the events of the final moments in a cycle past into a myriad of questions, because Kafei, with all his heart, intended to do exactly as he said. He would go to Anju. Nothing was more important to him.

And yet, he hadn't been there. But the mask was telling him that this was true: Kafei would do whatever it took to be there.

"Do," he said, with a voice like glass, "you promise?" His hand reached for the pendant with trembling fingers. "You will come for Anju?"

Tatl looked between the two of them, flabbergasted. " _What?!_ "

"Yes," said Kafei, and the Mask of Truth accepted it. "Yes. I promise. You can think whatever you want of me, but nothing is more important to me than my word. I will be there, and I will do this properly." He thrust the pendant into the trembling, waiting hands, and put his yellow fox mask back over his face.

"No matter what, I keep my word," Kafei swore. "No matter what."

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

Author's Note: Admittedly, I don't like how this one came out, but I'm sick of looking at it. Thank you for reading and leaving feedback! I treasure all of you!


	13. Bremen Mask

The red and green door to their room in the Stock Pot Inn fell shut with an underwhelming clatter. They'd nabbed the key right out from under the nose of a wayward Goron who consistently moved at his own pace, even if it was a step behind everyone else's schedule. Right now, he was sleeping outside with a resolute snore just a half-count behind the pulse of the town. Couldn't be helped that he missed his own check-in window.

The room was cheap, and not because their stay was free. The garish wallpaper peeled back at the corners near the ceiling, and failed to cover an entire section of the wall to the right of the fireplace, but the sheetrock beneath it did, too. Sparseness was an epidemic here: bare wood stared out at them from the hole in perpetual shock over its discovered exposure, the patterned blankets on the twin beds along the left wall were faded and worn, and the windows beyond them were undressed. The table disinterestedly stood in the center of the room, though the foxgloves in the vase atop it leaned towards them with great curiosity.

Tatl tugged at his hair. "What was that?"

He burned holes into the nosy foxgloves with his mask's eye.

"What," repeated Tatl, with mounting emphasis on each word, "was that? Huh? You froze, and then we left! Like a cow being led to pasture!"

"He was telling the truth." he said. His hand found the smooth front of his mask and tugged it from his face. "He really believes he's going to be there for her."

"Well, he wasn't. That's a fact." Tatl vaulted out of his hat and growled in his face. "He wasn't there, and the point of this is to make him be there!"

"I know," he said. "I was there. I saw."

"Yeah?" Tatl said. She zoomed in front of his face and bent over at the waist so that they were nose- to nose. "And did you see Anju's face when you gave her that pendant? Did you? Or was your weird mask too much in your face to take in how much false hope you just gave her?"

He stared, stone-faced and wide-eyed, at Tatl.

"What would you have had me do with it?"

"Oh!" Tatl threw her arms into the air. "Now you ask me!"

"What would you have me do with it? Hold onto it?"

Tatl's left eye twitched, and her lips twisted over on themselves.

"Bury it? Sell it?" he asked. "Throw it back in his face and tell him to deliver it himself? Is that what I should have done?"

Outside, the sun was neatly settling down beneath the horizon and pushing thick bars of gold through the windows and across the floor. He could feel with measured certainty the change of its distinct placement in the sky with each second that passed by.

"I don't know what you should have done with it," admitted Tatl. She snorted, and then fluttered in flustered circles around the vase of flowers on the table, arms crossed. "Alright? I don't know. But I think he's full of crap. Not that you'll listen to me. Not that what I think matters."

"Tatl," he tried.

She stopped pacing, just for a second, but then remembered that she'd dedicated their entire three days together to pretending like what he had to say didn't matter to her in any way whatsoever, positively or negatively, and resumed her circles with a faster and more deliberate clip.

It was an act they both liked to play into, he knew. She hated him, but needed him, and he hated her, but needed her. It was that simple, except for the rare moments where he was too tired to swim in his own anger and found himself condemned to give in to the undertow carrying on beneath the surface.

He tapped the white lacquered surface of the Mask of Truth, and wiped his face. The two beds leaning against the wall called to him. The one closest to the windows, specifically. Tatl said both spots were terrible, because the noise from the neighboring room broke through the inn's thin walls and plagued them indiscriminately, but the bed farther from the windows didn't have to deal with the draft coming in from the windows. He'd let her have it.

"Tatl," he tried again, quieter.

"Don't bother me!" she said, rising into the air and tinkling like a bell as her wings struck her back. "I don't wanna sit here and listen to whatever stupid opinion you have about this situation just so you can blow off mine! You ungrateful little monster!"

"Tatl."

"Shut up!" She reared back and chimed again. "Monster! Monster! Do you hear me?! Your fairy left you, she left you, and still, you were stupid enough to go into the Woods! You think you're gonna find her, or something? You think she was waiting? Is that why you were in the Woods, on your horse? You think your fairy wants to be found?! You think that?!"

He closed his eyes. "Tatl, that isn't what this is about right now."

She barrelled over him. "Well, what if she didn't want you to find her? Huh? What? What then? You were out there for nothing!" Spittle flew from her teeth, and her shoulders shook. "You got dragged into this whole mess for nothing! You're repeating this nonsense for nothing! You shouldn't have ever come here! You shouldn't've ever gotten caught up in our stupid little-! In my stupid little-!"

She covered her mouth. The fire in the fireplace crackled on her behalf. Anju must have started it for them earlier in the afternoon in anticipation for their return.

Her eyes had sparkled so brightly at the site of Kafei's pendant. She'd smiled so wide when it slid from his fingers and into her hands.

He pulled his hat from his head and dragged his fingers through his hair. The Mask of Truth fell to his other side, secured between the fingers of his left hand. He didn't need it for this.

"You think you're gonna make it out of this place?" Tatl continued, shaking, swallowing, hiccupping. "When you've only got it in you to go most of the way, and then choke right at the end?!" She shuddered. "You, you think you're gonna fix everything? You think you're some hero? H-huh?" She wiped at her eyes. "Is that what you think?!"

The sun set. They stared at one another in the interim.

He knew that they needed to be apart for a little while, like the moon and the sun needed to be in two separate skies instead of the same one at all times. They were too big for one space, he and Tatl, and they had grown so close that they'd started colliding and shearing off little pieces of each other. Pretty soon, they might eclipse one another, totally, and consume the other.

He turned around and opened the door.

"Hey!" Tatl cried. "Where are you-?!"

"I'll be back," he interrupted, and closed the door behind him.

"Are you leaving?! Are you leaving me in here?! Hey! Hey! Listen to-!"

He heard Tatl slam into the other side an instant later, along with her muffled and frantic voice through the wood.

"Don't you do this! Don't you leave me here! Please! If an adult finds me here alone- if someone finds me here alone, I don't, I don't know what they'll, what they'll try and-! And-! I'm sorry! I'm sorry! Please! Please don't leave me stuck in here!"

He had the door open in an instant. Tatl floated just in front of the doorway, with a face as pale as a ghost's.

His face probably was, too.

"You closed the door," she said.

"Yes," he said. "I didn't think about what that meant for you. I'm sorry."

"I thought you were going to leave me here, too, like the Skull Kid did," she said. "I thought," she swallowed. "Because of what I said, what I did, maybe you…"

She took it like that, like a trap. Of course she did. Tatl saw everything as a trap, because everything was a trap, to her. That wasn't his intention at all.

"No," he said. "No, never."

The truth was, he and Tatl didn't hate one another at all. They only wished that they did.

He stepped by her, and the table, and the crack in the wall, and the fireplace, and then to the window over his bed. He unlatched it, pushed it open, locked it in place, and then jammed an arrow from his quiver between the sill and the pane so it couldn't fall closed even if the lock failed.

"I will be back," he said. "I'm going to close the door again. Use the window to come and go if you need to."

"Where are you going?" Tatl asked. She clasped her hands over her wrists to stop them from shaking, and dug her fingers into her arm. "Where?"

"The laundry pool," he said. "I'm going to watch and see where Kafei goes, if anywhere."

"I'll come," said Tatl. She wiped at her glassy eyes. "I'll come with you."

"Come later," he said. "In an hour, maybe. Not right now."

Tatl shook her head, and glanced at the bare spot on the wall. "No."

"Come in an hour. I'll be there. I won't leave you."

"No," repeated Tatl.

"Tatl, I promise I-!"

"It's not just that." She looked to the bare spot on the wall again. "I don't want to be left alone here and listen to Anju and her mother argue through the walls. Not again." She floated through the doorway, and stopped just beneath the frame. "Not by myself."

He clipped the Mask of Truth against his belt and replaced his hat on his head. "Alright."

Tatl fluttered to his shoulder, next to his neck, and perched there without a word. He closed the door to their room and directed himself down the hall and to the stairs, just three steps behind the pensive Rosa sisters as they hurried to rehearse a dance routine they hadn't figured out not thirty-six hours before they'd never perform it. As the two of them made their way down, Anju made her way up.

She was right on schedule, though her full-mouthed smile replaced the empty-eyed goodnight so common to the night of the second day. A day and a few hours later, and he would have killed to see that smile on her face, but today he thought it might kill him. He wasn't ready. She wasn't ready. Kafei wasn't ready.

Anju stopped. So did he. He couldn't help it. Tatl's nails buried into him like she could feel his nerves as her own as he reached for the railing and steadied himself.

The three enormous heirloom masks mounted on the wall above them grinned through the clay of the old kingdom like all of this was funny.

Her hand brushed his shoulder- the one opposite Tatl. In her other hand was Kafei's pendant. He felt his body turn to stone.

"Thank you for staying with us," Anju whispered, and let him go with a soft squeeze. "Thank you so much."

He listened for her footsteps, and then for the door to her shared room to fall closed. Then, he counted to ten.

And then, he walked stiff-legged down the stairs and out the front door the Rosa sisters unlocked for him not a moment before.

Clock Town's Eastern plaza was overwhelmingly quiet, and, after the claustrophobic stairwell and hallways of the Stock Pot Inn, overwhelmingly vast in its emptiness. The storefronts and game parlors stood dark and empty around the single, central pillar holding aloft the torchlight for the neighborhood, like children sleeping near the light for fear of monsters lurking in the darkness. The carnival flags hanging from the ropes extending over the plaza from the neck of the torch fluttered softly in the nighttime breeze, unaware of the moon's red eyes upon them.

The Rosa sisters passed beneath them, still pensive. He and Tatl followed behind until the sisters turned towards the Western neighborhoods, where they would dance until the sun came up for the last time. The laundry pool was to the south.

Tatl leaned against his neck. He could feel her brow furrow against his skin, and the wetness on her cheeks rub onto him.

"I'm a failure of a guardian fairy," she said. "Did you know that?"

"I didn't know you were a guardian fairy," he said.

"I'm not," said Tatl. "That's why I'm a failure. So many children needed a guardian fairy in the wars. So many of them were left on the edges of the Woods." She shook her head. "Tael and I, we didn't lead them there. I wouldn't let us. I said it was too dangerous. The adults might find us, and they might take us instead."

"So many," she repeated. "They couldn't make it to the Kokiri meadow by themselves. They couldn't make it past the boundary of the Woods, either, because they were too scared. But their parents left them."

He reached over and stroked her head with two of his fingers. She didn't lean into it, but she didn't push him away, either.

"Children don't grow old if they go into the Woods. One way or another, that's one thing that will never happen to them. They'll turn into Skullchildren, or Kokiri, or become food for monsters, but growing old is something they'll never do."

"Yes," he said. The passage between the Eastern and Southern plazas were still and silent, save the trio of construction workers still measuring and sawing wood for the festival tower standing in opposition to the Clock Tower.

He looked over at the two towers, and then at the tiny, tiny pinpricks of orange light staring right back at them from just barely above the top of the Clock Tower. They neither flickered nor wavered; they only watched the two of them right back.

"I've failed the Skullkid," Tatl said. "Even if we save my brother, the mask already took the Skullkid from us. I've failed him."

He looked down at her as best he could. "He wasn't your responsibility."

"I failed him," argued Tatl, with finality. "I can't even finish a whole cycle without screaming at you for making a mistake, but the real truth is that I failed before you even started. I found him. I brought my brother to him. I helped him with his pranks. I picked you out in the Woods. I made my brother help me ambush you. I didn't take the ocarina or take Epona or change you into something else, but," she sniffed. "It was me. I lead you here."

He looked back to the top of the Clock Tower, but the eyes of Majora's Mask were gone.

"It wasn't you," he said.

"It was."

"It wasn't."

Tatl insisted. "But it was."

"It doesn't matter to me," he said, and that stopped her for a moment or two. "It doesn't. I am here now, and that is what matters."

The dog sleeping by in the plaza roused and perked an ear at them, but, because he was a human boy and not a wooden masquerader, let them go without question. The humid air from the swamp to the south wafted in through the gaping maw of the open town gate, and the steadfast guard beside it smiled pityingly as if he hadn't been the one they'd openly threatened last morning in a cycle past. The red mailbox just before the laundry pool was also none the wiser. He passed by all of them with a subdued wave, and nothing else.

"Say," Tatl said, with a voice soft and ragged, "tell me. If we fix this, and the door beneath the Clock Tower opens again, do you want me to take you?"

He turned his attention back to the street, and set himself back on the path to the laundry pool. "Take me where?"

"The Kokiri Forest Meadow," Tatl said.

It wasn't cold. It wasn't even particularly windy, but suddenly, suddenly, it was if the air around him cut right through his clothing and left him an empty shell of himself. He couldn't speak. He couldn't move.

"Because I'll take you there," Tatl said. "If you want. I'll go. For you, I'll go. But you'll be a child forever and ever, and I'll be your guardian fairy, forever and ever. You won't be able to grow up, or have a life beyond childhood, or have children, or die. That'll all be taken from you, if you follow me there. But I'll do it, if you want."

"I," he said.

She giggled. "I'll be a failure of a guardian fairy, but that's what I'll be, forever and ever, and ever, and if I commit to being a failure forever, I'll never be able to fail at that."

"I already have a guardian fairy," he said.

Tatl choked. Her giggles died in her throat, immediately.

"Oh," she said. "Right."

Tatl swallowed.

"You're going to, to find her. Right." She sucked in a breath. "She's, she's, she's waiting for you. Forget what, what, ah, what I said earlier. Just forget it. I was lying. She's, she's definitely waiting for you." Tatl put her arms around his neck. "You've already got a guardian fairy."

"Yes," he said.

He started again on the path to the laundry pool. Guru-Guru's music floated down the path in cyclical verses. Why he chose to play his music here, away from the dancers who needed him, none could say, but at night he made the pool overflow with the sound of his hurdy-gurdy as to not disturb his fellow patrons at the Stock Pot Inn.

Of course, his fellow patrons were right in front of him, now, still swept up in his music despite his best efforts. Guru-Guru's song was inescapable, as was the guilt he felt over stealing the Bremen Mask when he was still a child.

Tatl fluttered from her perch. Her eyes were red and swollen, even more so than before.

"Stay here," she said to her partner. "The keyhole to the door. I think, ah, I think I can get through it. I'll check on Kafei. By myself."

"Closed spaces scare you. You might get stuck. I can open-"

"No," said Tatl. "I can do this. You don't even know what to say to him if he tries to talk to you." She pushed her hair out of her face. "I can do this. On my own." She bit her lip. "Please. I just." She shook her head. "I'll pop in, and then come right back out once I know for sure he's there, and then I'll, I'll go."

His heart leapt in his chest, but he couldn't say why. "Go?"

"Back to, to the room. I just." She pressed a fist over her eye. "I need to be alone. You were, were right. About asking me to stay in the room."

"You're leaving?"

"You were right. I was fine in the room. I… I'm tired."

He looked from the Curiosity Shop's back door to Guru-Guru, who had stopped playing to check something within his instrument and to smile at the two of them- and the world in general. Guru-Guru was like the Happy Mask Salesman: always smiling, except for when he wasn't.

"I," he said, and then nodded, even though it felt wrong. "Are you alright?"

"I'll be in the room," Tatl repeated. "I'll go in through the open window. I won't leave you. So don't," she glanced around, "don't worry. Just." She rubbed at her eyes, again. "Let me do this," she said, and hurried off to the keyhole in a trail of light before he could argue.

She landed on the doorknob. He held his breath as her soft white light bounced off the curved metal, and off the glassy surface of the water in the pool while she slowly examined, and then pushed herself through, the old keyhole in the door. Her head went first, her wings last, and for a split second he had the horrific thought of them getting caught on the keyhole's metal edges and tearing. It took all of his willpower to keep from running after her and pulling her back out before she hurt herself. But, somehow, she made it inside, and he held his ground.

And for the first time since arriving in Termina, he found himself without her.

The walls around him suddenly seemed a lot taller, and the night sky deeper and more isolating. He couldn't understand it; he had been alone so often, before. This shouldn't feel new, and it shouldn't be strange. But it was.

Guru-Guru started the crank on his hurdy-gurdy again with absolutely no consideration for how it sent his unwitting audience toppling over himself in surprise. He pulled himself together and whirled around to face the cheery musician.

Guru-Guru flashed his teeth. "Sorry, sorry. But you looked so sad. I couldn't help myself!"

He looked back to the doorknob Tatl disappeared into. "I, I'm sorry," he said.

"Oh, don't be," said Guru-Guru. "She'll be back. That's how this works. Don't worry. Fairies don't leave their children, unless they grow up. Even I know that."

He winked, and accelerated the crank on the side of his hurdy-gurdy. The wooden box holding the gears had barely any paint left on it from so many days of wear, and the metal neck of the phonograph extending from the box, beneath Guru-Guru's body, and behind his back was naked silver instead of coated gold. It tooted out Guru-Guru's song with eccentric cheer.

He bit his lip and watched for Tatl. "Maybe she got stuck," he said. "This is silly. I should go help her."

"Oh, let her be," said Guru-Guru. "You're a big boy. She's a smart girl. Wait here, like she asked. You can do that, can't you?"

"I'm not usually the one waiting," he admitted. "Not anymore. I've done that. I'm done with that."

Guru-Guru nodded. "Huh. Cryptic! Ha!" He opened his mouth and sent his laugh to the sky, like he could project sound all on his own and the phonograph was only for show.

The apples in his cheeks ripened, and he abandoned his instrument to slap his knees.

"You're funny! You're a funny little boy, you know?"

He felt himself start to blush. When he was younger, before he had a fairy at all, only one person called him funny in sincerity and she was nowhere to be found. His hands itched for the Mask of Truth, even though he told himself that he didn't need it. "Thank, ah, thank you?"

Guru-Guru chuckled, and took his crank in hand. "How about a story?" he asked. "To pass the time. Until she comes back out to say goodnight, huh?"

"I already know your story, Guru-Guru," he said.

Guru-Guru raised his eyebrows, but revealed nothing else from behind his gleaming smile. "What's it about?"

He frowned, but he humored Guru-Guru anyway. "It's about the leader of a group of dancing and singing animals, and a little boy who was jealous that he wasn't the leader even though he thought he could do a much better job."

The song in Guru-Guru's box filtered through his phonograph at speed. "Oh! And? And?" He grinned, but knowingly this time, like an old Ikana mask. "What else? What else? Come on, now! You can't tell me something like that and then stop! Tell me! Tell me more!" He tapped his foot on the dirt in time with his song. "Come on! Tell me! You know, right?"

He shouldn't have said anything. "Guru-Guru, it doesn't make you a bad person because you were jealous once," he said.

Guru-Guru's song turned at a frantic pace. "Oh, but you know. You know what I did, right? You know how jealous I was, and how it ate at me inside, right? About how I was nothing, because a mere dog was in place of the leader? You know about it?"

Guru-Guru stopped turning, and the music from his box halted with such finality that it may as well have taken all the sound of the town with it.

"So? Tell me!" His grin was manic. "If you know so much, tell me how it ends!"


	14. Goron Mask

"Hm." said Darmani. "If everyone forgot me, I don't rightly know how I'd react. Although, if they forgot about me because the never-ending snows of winter blanketed over my failure, that would be one thing, I suppose. I almost felt worse that they spent the energy and effort to give me a grave when I had, effectively, done nothing for them."

Darmani's grave was in the cave to his back, soaking in the eternal hot spring, but Darmani's body was neither beneath it nor lost in the ravine around Snowhead. It was intact and moving. Darmani had his legs. His chest was in one solid piece, and without a gash ripping through his lungs and heart. To his left was the impostor who took his face.

"But if I had succeeded, and they forgot about me once the ice melted, well." Darmani shook his head. "Goro-ro-ro."

The two of them were sitting, legs dangling, on the edge of the overlook above the Snowhead Valley, just outside the site of Darmani's grave. It was spring, and not the third day spring he could manage in his limited time. In front of him was a full spring, with the mountains good and green, the plants bursting with full blooms, and a soft film of yellow-green pollen dusting the roof of the mountain smithy's redwood cabin and gathering at the edges of the clear blue mountain pond. Looking at it made him want to sneeze.

"They're only able to forget because I succeeded," he said. "I lived. My story doesn't have a clean and easy ending. I don't get a grave with my name on it, so nobody remembers it. That's how it works. Bad times are behind them, and so they get to forget. They get to throw out everything that makes them think of how bad it was, and that includes me." He held out his hands. "After winter, spring comes, and the snow melts away. All of it."

Once upon a time, Darmani's hot spring was the start of a river that flowed down out of the cave and erupted into a vast waterfall right where the two of them sat. The valley below guided it to the base of the mountain, where it found the western ocean and tangled itself in the waves. But the spring wasn't a river, anymore. Now, the northern mountains only fed one river instead of two- the river flowing southeast, through Ikana and then to the swamp, when spring came to melt the ice on the mountains. From the north, the rivers in Termina moved clockwise, and in cycles. Granny said it wasn't that way when the Four Giants were here. Granny said the rivers connected the four worlds in the four cardinal directions because they followed the trails left by the Giants' footsteps. They stopped because the flow of time changed them. They stopped because the Four Giants stopped walking among the people.

Darmani pursed his lips. The capillaries inside paled at the pressure until they almost matched his wild, peaked mane of hair and beard. On the back of his head, a single spike rose from his skull and protruded out of his white hair like a summit that never froze; a reverse-Snowhead. It held steady as he shook his head from side to side and his coarse hair danced around it.

"You would know better than I would, I suppose," he said. "I've been a hero to my people and a symbol to my brothers almost all of my life, yes, but for small things. Unlike you, I had never taken on a task quite as daunting as defeating winter before. Perhaps it was arrogant of me to assume I had any business intervening with something so out of my depth."

"It was arrogant to assume you could do it by yourself," he said.

"Oh, as I remember it, strange traveller, I had no qualms about asking for your help. We were trapped here, understand! Before you appeared, I had nobody that I, in good conscience, could ask." Darmani grinned and showed off the vast gaps in his uneven teeth. "But you can use magic."

"I can use other people's magic," he corrected.

"You can use magic," insisted Darmani. "I gave you everything I had without question. My face, my strength, my name, my reputation, everything. As far as I am concerned, my life is now yours. I gave it without a second thought, and I have no regrets."

He shrugged. "It certainly was a decision that you made, yes."

"It was what you wanted," said Darmani.

"It was what I needed. I would not have gotten anywhere without your help."

"True, but it is also what you wanted," impressed Darmani.

He turned, and, resting his elbows on his knees, squinted up into Darmani's round eyes.

They twinkled above a wry grin. "Well, it is what you thought you wanted, anyway."

The birds in the valley began a call-and-response with the frogs swimming in the crystalline pond, who sang the melody right back, only backwards. The birds returned the backwards melody, and the frogs righted it.

" _What?_ "

Darmani smiled. "What?"

He wiped his mouth and gesticulated with his hand- the left one, the one reserved for his sword. "I don't mean any offense, but why on earth do you think that I wanted to be a Goron?"

Darmani laughed. His protruding stomach rumbled and heaved with the sound, and the mountainside carried it down the cliff and into the valley, and then to Termina Field, where the foothills reservoir used to meet the ocean.

"A Goron! Just a Goron!" Darmani wiped his eyes. "No, strange traveller! I am not just a Goron! I am a proud member of my tribe! They know me by name and by deed! I am the chosen successor to my living Elder!"

He stood, and gestured to the mountain, the sky, to Snowhead beyond the peaks, and to the valley below. "I am Darmani the Third, with a family line I know and cherish, and is cherished in the stone heart of these mountains! I am beloved by all of my people, in life and death, in failure and success! There is no question as to who I am or where I belong!"

Darmani beat his chest like one of his drums, and held his hand out to his impostor.

"My story is written. You know the beginning, you know the middle, and you know the end, because you picked up the pen and wrote the ending where I left off. You returned from the grave a hero, before you so much as set foot inside of Snowhead itself. You succeeded before you even began." He winked. "Is it not everything you wanted?"

He stared up at Darmani, at how the cut of the mountain peaks in the distance framed his worn face like he was part of the mountain range itself. The sky above him was as blue as a robin's egg, as blue as Saria's eyes.

"I," he said, and then shook his head. "No. That isn't why. That isn't why I put myself in your place. That was not my intention."

"Oh, of course not. Not in the moment." Darmani's uneven teeth pushed out from between his lips again. "But when it was over, when you returned to my brothers with spring on your heels and snow melting with every step you took, I did not see you reveal yourself to them. When they cheered you with my name in their mouths, I did not hear you correct them."

"It would have been useless," he argued. He stood, and craned his head upwards to meet Darmani's sparkling eyes. His head came to Darmani's waist, though it would have come just below Darunia's chest. "Come the first day, and they would have forgotten again. I couldn't break their hearts like that- not when they thought you had just returned to them! Not when the moon was coming the morning after!"

"But it could have been you as their hero, for just that moment. It could have been your name that they adored and revered." Darmani took a step to the left, and his shadow fell from his body to dwarfed his impostor. "If just for a moment, they would have remembered you in my place."

He stepped backwards, closer to the sheer cliff of the dead waterfall.

"It didn't feel right," he said. "It didn't feel right to put myself in your story."

Darmani crossed his arms, but did not close the distance between them. In fact, he put more distance between them and blocked out the sun almost entirely. "Well, I would not have minded. I gave you the right to do whatever you wanted to with my face, with name."

"Do you," he searched his chest and belt for Darmani's mask, but couldn't find it, and so held out his empty hands, "do you want it back?"

Darmani reached behind his head and scratched."I cannot take it back."

He took another step back, so he could breathe outside of Darmani's immense shadow, but it proved inescapable. The birds below mimicked a lullaby he knew too well.

"I'm sorry," he said.

Darmani hung his head. "Oh, don't be. I asked you for this. I only wish that my face suited you. I wish that you could carry my name with joy, and with pride, since yours cannot satisfy you."

Suddenly, Darmani looked up. The sun appeared and disappeared between the peaks of his hair. "Say, strange traveller, tell me. I never asked, and nobody knows once the three days begin again. What is your name, anyway?"

The question took him aback another step, and he felt the open air beyond the cliff swallow his leg and drag him down, down, down.

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

"He's gone," Tatl said, and the panic in her voice sprayed over him like icy water.

He opened his eyes. He was in the Stock Pot Inn, nestled beneath the covers of the bed on the inside of the room, farthest away from the draft. Tatl's bed. The thin, early sun of the third day was creeping in through the open window one pale finger at a time. She was poised over his head, comparatively radiant, and with a letter as big as she was clutched between her needling fingers.

"He's gone," she repeated. "Kafei is gone!"

He threw back the covers. His masks were strewn about the bed next to him, with Darmani's mask on the pillow, next to his head, just beneath the Bremen Mask. He did not remember laying them out, and he never would have put Darmani to the east and not the north.

"What?! When?! What happened?!"

"You fell asleep!" Tatl cried, "You let Guru-Guru distract you, and you fell asleep!"

He put his hand on the Bremen Mask at the sound of Guru-Guru's name, and drew a hand down his face as he counted the rest with a frantic tally.

"They're all here, alright?! Guru-Guru laid them all out when he brought you back here, and I already counted them!" She threw the letter on the bed, right over his hands. "Stop fussing with your stupid masks and focus!"

He looked down at the envelope. Pearlized lilac, with rose and indigo ribbons draping from the wax seal. Kafei's stationary, the same as his mother's. He squinted at the even, handwritten name above the address. Aroma.

"Kafei wants us to deliver this to his mother." Tatl pointed at it. "The greasy man who runs the Curiosity Shop. He gave this to me, because I said that I was with you."

He snorted and ripped open the wax seal without a second thought. The message was short:

 _Dear Mother,_

 _I have gone to fulfil a promise to the only woman I love as much as you. Her family may not be as prestigious as you wished, but I love her anyway. I hope you can find it in your heart to be happy for us, despite everything._

 _Do not try to find me, and do not wait for me._

He snorted, and before Tatl could so much as grind her teeth in outrage, crumpled up the letter between his hands.

"Don't tell me what to do," he muttered, and threw it on the bed.

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

Author's Note: Thank you, as always, for your feedback! Together, we'll solve the Anju/Kafei sidequest eventually!


	15. Garo Mask

Ikana's striated walls carried the wind down through the canyon and over the cracked earth in a resounding, haunting, strained echo. It was as if the air was Ikana's voice, and the canyon its throat. Long ago, the Garo tore deep, bloody gashes into this place on their way to Ikana's heart, and the scars left the Old Kingdom all but mute. They still trailed down the canyon walls in places, and marked the graves of Ikana's still-vigilant soldiers.

Tatl flew overhead. Her white wings beat out an even rhythm against the sallow sky. This place emanated bloodlust and teemed with creatures coated in gunpowder, and she had the greater talent for scouting out both. They'd been scanning the canyon walls for about four hours, now, but all they'd found was red earth and drying, dying grass.

The river, the one that flowed from the Northern mountainside and carried on to the swamp, hurled itself from the canyon wall to their left and broke itself against the low riverbed. Above it, the bed of the true Ikana River, the old one, where Composer Sharp lurked even in death, ran dry. He made an effort to ignore the grimace of the third day moon hanging above their heads.

"Do you think it would make any difference if I got the river to flow again?" he asked.

Tatl looked up the cliff separating the crest of Ikana Hill from the rest of the canyon. The ground beneath her groaned and rumbled, but she pretended like she did not hear it.

"I don't know," she said, finally. "I don't know where that guy's hideout might be. We might've passed it, for all I know, unless it's up there, but we've been there before and I didn't see anything suitably suspicious then."

"There's the palace," he said.

"Huh?"

Old Ikana had a king. Granny said so. His ancestors built their kingdom from the clay of the canyon and covered it in the ore of the river and mines from the north, and then gave it their name to carry until the day it finally fell. They decorated Ikana in paint and patterns passed down to this day; they live on upon the walls of Clock Town, the work of the northern mountain smithy, the bric-a-brac on the townsfolk's shelves, the pattern of Anju's skirts, and Kafei's family crest.

The empty shell of the Old Kingdom's former glory stood sealed in the cliffs, and overlooked where the river once spilled out into the lower canyon, back before it dried up along with the wealth, power, and prosperity. He and Tatl had not disturbed it.

Yet.

"The walls and gates looked untouched, but there's more than one way inside," he said. "If Kafei really is after a thief brave enough to choose a place like this to live, it's the perfect place to go. There's no danger in looting if you're living in the place you've looted."

Tatl peered up the canyon wall, again, with a measured stare. "I don't think anyone's in there. I don't think there's anything living up there except Pamela and her father, and even that count is questionable without you there to meddle." She looked east, towards the waterfall. "Think there's something behind that waterfall?"

"Always," he admitted, and pulled Mikau's mask onto his face.

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

Ropes draped in ancient cloth tags layered over the bars of a rotted door. A face of three holes- two crude eyes and an open, circular mouth- marred each tag and watched over the waterfall cave. They stared into him with an intent, quiet fixation, and silently screamed through the darkness.

The thing behind the waterfall was not a thief's hideout, but a shrine to something sinister and pointed. It sat in the back of a cave carved by the elements and time, and leered, sullenly, at the waterfall streaming down in front of it. A veil of mist filled the cave, and the light streaming inside from above transformed it into a halo of shimmering color on the rock walls. However, the shrine door remained just out of the light's reach, and the shaded sun emblem carved over the barred and tagged door slept on, oblivious to the roaring water and shrieking faces around it.

The moon's third day pull shook the earth, and the ropes trembled like they might fall off and let loose whatever lurked behind them at any minute.

"We've been some questionable places before, you and I, but this one..." Tatl covered her mouth. "You feel that, don't you?"

Mikau's scales rumpled as the skin beneath them shuddered from an indescribable chill. They might consume him. The faces in the cloth. They might draw the soul right out of his body and consume him, if he got too close.

"Yes," he said.

"He's not in there," said Tatl. "I can absolutely guarantee that he is not in there."

He looked up at the sleeping sun emblem. The cave's overhang ensured that the light of the real sun never touched it, no matter the time of day.

Once, someone described time to him as a flowing river. It was cruel and swift. No one could change it. Once, someone described darkness to him as something time could not reach. It absorbed time. It consumed it. It consumed everything.

Day and night were interchangeable to that door; the flow of days didn't matter here, as the sunlight never reached it. The flow of time passed by this place, just as the waterfall did.

"I agree," he said. "He's not in there."

"Let's go." Tatl pushed his shoulder. "I don't want to find out what's in there if we don't have to. Please."

The earth trembled, and the tags shuddered with an unspoken threat.

"Alright."

He turned away, towards the waterfall, and motioned for Tatl to follow him out before diving in and avoiding the waterfall's stomping, brutal foot. She flew around it and to the river's shore.

The water's current pulled him along at a swift clip and deposited him at the tired, bisected bridge clinging to the western and eastern sides of the river. Modern explorers, or modern fools, used to cross the bridge when it was whole, and then scale the long-worn remnants of what used to be stairs to the Old Kingdom's heart.

Someone wise and afraid, or perhaps malicious and superstitious, had split the bridge in two. Red-orange dust clung to the insides of the grooves in the unfinished wooden surface, except where a hard black waterline coated the bottom half of its remaining supports. People- Pamela, her father, this thief Kafei sought- used the western bank bridge as a landing for boats and rafts of supplies, so a newer, more secure ramp and dock reached down into the water to lead him out, but the river was otherwise untamed from decades and centuries of human absence. Mikau grabbed the side of the wooden landing and hauled his body out of the water's grip.

He took off Mikau's mask, and shed his skin to become a Hylian boy.

Tatl watched the whole process with an even, unimpressed blink. "I'm not going back to that place. Ever. Even if it turns out that Kafei got himself locked in there somehow."

He blinked his eyes and readjusted himself to the afternoon sunlight. "He didn't."

"I know," said Tatl. "I'm just telling you. I've followed you everywhere, but I won't follow you there. Do you understand?"

"We're not after whatever is inside of there right now. "

Tatl squinted. "Right now?"

Darkness held secrets, and he spent this whole journey looking for secrets. He shrugged. "Later, I don't know."

"You would say that. Only you. But you would." Tatl looked around. "But can't you… can't you sense it? Is it really just me? This whole canyon's bad, honestly."

The ground trembled under the moon's hungry eyes like it could feel Tatl's fear.

He replaced Mikau's mask and rifled through the rest of his collection like it hadn't happened. "Bad? Because it reminds you of me?"

Tatl snorted. "Ha! No. Well, maybe. But I'm not talking about how depressing it is." She fluttered closer to him. "Do you really not feel that?"

"The shaking earth? That's because of the—"

"No, you idiot. Of course I know about that. I meant that… that feeling."

"I don't know what 'that feeling' is."

"I told you before. Bloodlust," said Tatl. "That's the only word for it. I don't know where it's coming from. I feel it every time we come through here, but it concentrates in places. The riverside, the top of Ikana Hill, the outer wall of the palace, the mouth of the canyon spring cave. Places like that."

As Tatl went on, he found the Garo's mask and pulled it into the open.

Ikana's downfall was a war. Or, if Granny's stories about Majora were true, Ikana's downfall manifested as complications from a war that never ended, thanks to Majora's influence. A neighboring kingdom caught wind of the prestige of Ikana, and they coveted the prosperity and power. They coveted the stable, lush throne Ikana sat upon. They coveted Majora, and they coveted the mask. They sent their robed Garo to steal it away.

Eventually, the Garo and the people of Ikana all deserted the battle or killed one another, but neither side ever surrendered.

Ikana's King was never taken, but Captain Keeta, the commander of Ikana's army, lost the Ikana Valley to the Garo. The Captain's Hat and authority of command might mean something in the eyes on Ikana Hill, but here in the valley where the river ran, the Garo decided who lived and who died, who journeyed forth and who turned back. It was the Garo's mask that granted him entry to the canyon.

He put their mask on over his face.

Tatl noticed, and balked. "What are you doing?! What are-?!" Her gaze broke away from him and at something over his shoulder.

"Master," said the wind.

He turned around.

The sallow daylight beating down from above faded to an overcast sky. A brown robe held together in the front by a strip of thick red, gold, and black embroidery floated above the faded grass. Bandages wrapped around thin air where someone's legs should be, and two pricks of light stared out from beneath the robe's hood, but otherwise, the figure was nothing but empty cloth.

Tatl stiffened.

The wind rustled the fabric as it called out to him. "...Master? You called?"

He pulled off the Garo's Mask and tossed it to the ground like a gauntlet.

"You..." The glowing eyes flashed with a piercing light, and twin swords slid from the left and right sides of the cloak with a steely hiss. Foxfire erupted from the grass and circled them both as the ground rumbled beneath their feet with an emphatic roar.

"How dare you!"

The cloak darted forwards with swords thrust out first. The attack met the Mirror shield with a metallic ring.

"Gunpowder," warned Tatl. "It smells like gunpowder! Don't let it touch the flames with you near it!"

"What are you?!" The Garo robe swung its swords towards its opponent's feet.

He hopped away, and they left two gashes in the earth instead.

Garo die without leaving a corpse. That is what Pamela's father said, and what Granny said, too. They died without leaving corpses, and their robes, their symbols as Garo, continued their mission after death from willpower alone.

He could not kill this enemy, as it had already died, but he could still defeat it in honorable combat.

He bashed his shield into the body of the robe, and then sliced through it as he drew his sword.

The Garo's swords fell limply into the earth, and the robe fluttered to the ground. The foxfire melted into the ground, and the sun returned.

The wind whispered through the cloak. "R-regrettable…"

The earth growled with a begrudging timbre.

The cloak spoke again once it finished. "Although my rival, you were spectacular. I shall take my bow by opening my heart and revealing my wisdom."

Tatl chimed in the air. "You…?"

Though they engaged Ikana in a war, Garo were not warriors in life. They were spies, and their mission had never ended.

"Have you seen a thief come through this place?" He asked. "A prancing man with a grinning face?"

"Few cross the bridge," said the Garo. "Few crest Ikana Hill. A man with small eyes lurks by the river and considers it during the day, but never leaves the shore. Belief or disbelief rests with you."

Tatl buzzed closer. "Do you know where he goes? Do you know where he lives?!"

The cloak made no answer, but instead revealed a gunpowder sack, just as Tatl had warned.

He grabbed her out of the air and threw himself to the ground for cover.

Behind him, the cloak, the sword, and the sack exploded in a blast of light and sound.

"To die without leaving a corpse," said the wind, like an afterthought. "That is the way of us Garo."

He counted to ten, and then peeked at the site of the explosion.

The Garo's remains were gone along with the clouds. The Garo's mask- the one he tossed to the ground in an act of aggression- waited for its retrieval, untouched. The deceased Garo underling had only a brown hood to cover itself, but this mask was much more elaborate: the faceplate was gold metal, and it glinted in the incessant sunlight with a timeless polish. The tall, crownlike crest extending from above the forehead slid down the face and ended in a hooked, beak-like nose. Its round, empty eyes watched its new wearer lift it up, and then took his point of view as he set it over his face.

"Again?" said Tatl. "You're going to call those things out again?!"

He adjusted the mask's purple hood and mantle over his neck and shoulders. "They have been watching this place since before they died. If anyone knows where a thief is hiding in this canyon, it's them."

"You're creepy," said Tatl.

"I am also right," he countered.

"Oh, don't worry. I never said you weren't." She fluttered ahead of him. "But come on- there was another spot emanating that hateful feeling just a little farther down."

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

It would be incorrect to say that time had gotten away from them- or that they were running out- because he had absolute command over an eternal supply of three days, but the blatant tremors in the earth were growing more frequent as the third day moon drew closer and the third day sun sank farther down the horizon. The timer in his chest beat with unnecessary emphasis on each passing second, like if they did not find Kafei soon, he'd get sucked into darkness and all would be lost.

However, the Garo's information proved invaluable.

Sakon's hideout hid behind a massive rock a few miles upstream from the waterfall shrine. It was just far enough to escape the stare of the Old Kingdom's palace. Its only witnesses were the canyon, the moon, the distant Stone Tower, and a stack of granite leftovers from a long-forgotten Ikana ruin. The river alongside it had carved the ravine too deep to see over the lip anymore, so it hurried by obliviously as the earth jostled the scene.

He took Darmani's form and pelted the rock with bone-shattering blow after bone-shattering blow until his thick knuckles bruised and cracked from the abuse, and then examined his work.

It sloughed off some of the rock in a few places and cracked it in others, but otherwise, Sakon's hideout was thoroughly sealed.

"Well, that was a bust," said Tatl. "I don't really think you can blow that thing away with explosives, either.

Darmani's deep voice rumbled in his chest. It always sounded strange without Darmani's well-bred affectations flavoring his speech. "There is surely another way in."

There had to be, and if Kafei had managed to get inside somehow, so would they.

He turned around and scanned the land. The late afternoon sun cast an eerie orange-red glow over the earth, and the long shadows of the canyon formations crawled towards the Old Kingdom like desperate fingers. The river severed the hideout from the eastern canyon wall and Ikana Hill, and the western canyon wall ended here, unless he were to scale it and continue along the top. The sparse ruins- a set of eroded, collapsed columns, really- hid only—

—a face. Someone peeked at him from around the ruins and then hid the instant he saw them.

Tatl zipped after the spy before he could say for her to do otherwise, and a moment later, a child toppled out from behind the cover of the ruined columns. His yellow fox mask fell from his face and skidded across the ground.

It wasn't a child. It was Kafei.

The Mask of Truth's observations may have quelled his damnation of Kafei's intentions, but he felt the tide of absolute outrage from the many three days past return in full force the moment he saw Kafei's face. Honestly, he wanted to grab Kafei by the collar with Darmani's massive hands and dash his head into a rock. His hands shook along with the ground. A few pebbles tumbled down the canyon wall and scattered on the valley's grass.

"You ungrateful little weasel!" Tatl shrieked, and then shrieked some more as Kafei scrambled away from her- or tried to.

He controlled himself, and took solace in the litany of insults Tatl hurled Kafei's way. He removed Darmani's mask, and hurried to Kafei's side as soon as his body finished shrinking and twisting.

"Wh-what?!" Kafei said, looking from Tatl to her companion. "Y-you! H-how did you do that?! How did you change like that?! If I had known it was you and not some Goron vagabond, I would have—! But, h-how—?"

"How did you get transformed into that body?" Tatl jabbed at him. "Huh?! Is it that unbelievable that someone can change?!"

"I was cursed!" said Kafei. "I am stuck like this! But this, this is different! You—!"

No. It was not different. But it was also none of Kafei's business.

"We've come to bring you to Anju," he said.

The earth quaked again. Kafei steadied himself and ran his hand through his hair.

"No. Not, not yet," he said. "My mask. The Sun's Mask. It means nothing if I do not have it."

He took Kafei's arm. "That's nonsense. I've entertained this enough."

"No!" Kafei pulled his arm away and whirled around to face him. "I must have it! Nothing is more important to me than keeping my promise to Anju- and I promised that I would greet her with the Sun's Mask!"

Tatl growled and pulled at her hair.

"Come," urged Kafei. His eyes gleamed with conviction. "Come help me. It's just a little longer. You've come this far, and you have helped me so much already."

"You're ungrateful," he said. His heart hammered out the seconds in his chest.

Kafei shook his head. "No. No. I'm more grateful than I can say, but I can't turn back yet. Not when I'm so close. I can't."

"Yes, you can," he argued.

Kafei shook his head and tugged at his confidant's green clothes. "Quickly! Hide with me behind this rock. The thief, that Sakon," said Kafei, with venomous disdain on the name, "will return soon, and we can't afford to be seen. When he comes, we—!"

Tatl chimed, and cursed.

Kafei whirled around. They both whirled around.

As an individual, Sakon was not considerably imposing. He was taller than average, but thinner than average, and his whimsical tics and foibles made him appear just as airheaded and demure as they did suspicious.

However, he was also standing just behind them at about ten steps away with a sack held at his side and his signature smile spread on his face. Where Guru Guru's was unnervingly enigmatic, Sakon's was abhorrently slimy.

He had a knife. He had not drawn it, but its hilt rested right by his free hand.

"And here I thought someone scary might find my hideout," said Sakon. "What are you two boys doing? Don't you know it's dangerous here?" He gave a high-pitched chuckle. "Aren't your parents worried about—?"

Kafei charged him.

Tatl chimed, again. "Kafei, no!"

Sakon dropped his bag and pulled the knife out on Kafei in one smooth motion. It would have lodged itself in Kafei's shoulder had his confidant not pulled him away and pushed Sakon forwards, towards the cliff above the river.

He tried to pull Kafei behind himself and draw his sword, but Ikana's entire army could not get between the cursed man and the thief. Kafei threw himself at Sakon and tackled his legs.

The two might have fallen in a heap on solid ground. They might have, had the moon's pull not shaken both Sakon and Kafei off-balance and sent them careening over the cliff.

"No!"

Tatl flew after them in a panic, and her partner slid towards the cliff's edge and looked down at the river just in time to see a white-foamed splash break the surface.

She made uneven circles in the air. "Get—! Get the—!"

He already had Mikau's mask ready in his hand. He dove from the cliff, and transformed himself on his way down the canyon and into the river. The water swallowed him in the same instant Mikau's scales enveloped his skin and granted him gills and fins.

Mikau was a fierce swimmer, but the river was fiercer; the hideout marked the beginning of a series of waterfalls that ultimately ended at the foot of Woodfall mountain in the swamp. The current bullied him even as he followed it, and soon he found himself spinning head over feet and fighting to regain his bearings. The first drop ejected him from the stream for an instant before tossing him right back into the river. He managed to grab the sides of the rock wall after the second drop, even as it shook from the moon's influence.

Mikau's fingers felt like they might rip off his palms, and he panted and sucked down the river's rampant spray.

Tatl, who followed the river from the air, caught up with him a frantic moment later.

"Where—?"

"I don't know!" Mikau's voice rattled with the strain of screaming over the roaring, rushing water. "I couldn't- I couldn't see them! It's too dark! The current, it's too fast!"

"We have to start over!" shouted Tatl. "We can't fix this one! You have to do it again!"

"I can't play my instrument here!"

"Well, what do you want to do?! Get crushed under the waterfall, or suffocate when the poison swamp seeps into Mikau's porous skin and stops his heart?!"

She was right. Kafei and Sakon, no matter where the river spat them out, were dead. They were dead. He might be, too, if he didn't start things over, and then, without him, without the Song of Time, without the grace of another three days, everyone would die for forever.

The water pushed Mikau's head under, and he fought to surface again.

If only Kafei wasn't so stuck on his stupid, petty promise! Didn't he realize that there were much bigger promises that needed keeping, much larger issues than his one promise of presenting a mask to his fiance?! Didn't he know?!

He had to bring a smile to Anju's face! He had to save Tatl's brother! He had to put all of Ikana to rest, for Captain Keeta! He had to guarantee the things he changed in three days past stayed changed, like spring coming to the mountains, like the ocean's temperature finally leveling off, like the swamp having clean water again, like maintaining the safety of Romani and her cows, like granting the Postman his freedom, or like Kafei's own mother knowing where her selfish, idiot son is!

He had to find Navi! He had to! He promised himself!

Mikau's fingers were slipping. The water was adamant. He had to let it take him and risk hitting the bottom before he reset the clock.

He closed his eyes, counted out ten more seconds of certainty in heartbeats, and then let himself go into the current.

Summoning Mikau's guitar from the ocarina was not difficult, and the notes to the Song of Time were never far from his mind. The current marred his performance and threatened to rip the instrument away from him, but the Song of Time did not fail.

At first, he felt himself falling down the final waterfall to the swamp, but soon he was falling through nothingness instead, like when he first fell through the trunk of the tree leading to Termina. He fell into true darkness, back then, and time had ceased to be, but this void he was falling through now, right now, was not that. This was the river of time. It was not stopping. It might reverse itself for him, but it did not stop.

Mikau's mask separated from his body. He felt his skin change, his breathing change, and his limbs shorten, but he knew the mask would still be with him when he opened his eyes in Clock Town at six o'clock in the morning.

He had so many things to do. Death would not change that. Anju was waiting, Tael was waiting, the Garo were waiting, the soldiers of Ikana were waiting. Even in death, Ikana and its enemies were still waiting for someone to tell them that the war was over. They were waiting.

The person they were waiting for never came, and they never would. They had chosen him instead.

They were waiting for him.

He wondered exactly how many ways someone could fail before the only thing left was a single, inevitable success.

Then, he opened his eyes, and raised that number by one.


	16. Captain's Hat

Musty bandages snapped in two as the Gibdo's rotted mouth wrenched open and screamed with a horrible desire. Its wrapped hands came closer, closer, then closer still, and ghosted across his skin. The smell of the wet earth in the walls and the mouldy caress of death called the hairs on his arms to stand on their ends. He felt his breathing accelerate and his heart threaten to burst from his chest with each centimeter closer the Gibdo came to him. He forced himself to hold his breath and count the seconds as they passed.

He could smell the corpse's foul breath, see the worms crawling beneath its wrappings, and feel, with every ounce of his being, the way it toyed with the idea of sucking out his soul even as it accepted the deal made between them.

Its icy hands clasped around his shaking ones, and he felt his pulse stop.

"Leave it," the Gibdo hissed. "Leaaaaaave it!"

He spilled the milk from the open bottle grasped in his hands. The droplets washed over the corpse's palms and percolated through the wrappings, and suddenly, the Gibdo rotted away into harmless dirt right before his very eyes.

The door to the last room of the labyrinth clicked, and the bars over it were no longer.

The bottom of the well was the same his second visit as his first. The embalmed undead still guarded each of the labyrinth's passages with jealous determination, and still negotiated their demands with piercing shrieks and an ever-present threat of death.

They called out for whatever it was they lacked in life that lead to their demise: this one wanted milk for their child. One sought the means to grow crops and create a lasting livelihood. Another only wanted a fish to feed them for a day. One wanted medicine that might have cured the fatal wounds of their once-living body, one wanted kindling for a fire to keep them from freezing, one wanted warm water to fight a cold, and one wanted the power to bring down the canyon and blow their enemies sky high. The list went on.

One among the Gibdo wanted a fairy. He and Tatl dared not discuss anything about that particular exchange- not the first time they entered the well, and not the second. He simply hid her in his hat without a word. She did not fight him.

He let out a choked sob, and then braved the other side of the door.

This was the end of the labyrinth. The wall was divided in even tiles instead of uniform, packed earth, and plagued with painted patterns and carvings like the rest of the kingdom. Originally, the Mirror Shield rested in a chest inside this chamber and not on the strap upon his back, but he stole it through time two days from now. A sleeping sun relief identical to the one above the waterfall shrine inattentively dozed above where the chest should be.

Above them was open air, and a pillar of light fell through the ceiling and spilled over the earthen floor. The abruptness of its introduction so soon after the sepulcher darkness of the labyrinth stung his eyes. It had not been so bright during their last visit. Last time, the ceiling had been the night sky.

When the door closed behind them, Tatl revealed herself.

He pulled the Mirror Shield from his back. The daylight illuminated the metal and bounced from its surface like he held a miniature sun on his arm instead of a ceremonial weapon. With it, he reflected the light from above to the carved sun on the wall.

The relief faded away like a shadow. A painted ladder hid behind it.

"Wait," urged Tatl.

He waited. "Yes?"

"Let's go back." Tatl fluttered in a hasty circle. "We can go to the Bay, or something. We can relax in Mikau's room. We can go to the fishing hole at the swamp and kill time there."

"We have an entire thirteen hours to kill," he reasoned. "You want to go fishing for thirteen hours?" He put away the shield, found the ladder with his hands, and tested the rungs to see if time had enfeebled it. It held.

Tatl frowned deeply.

"I might as well spend my time hunting for a way to climb the Stone Tower, and this is as good a lead as any. Besides, I-"

"You're scared."

He pulled the Gibdo's Mask from his face and met her with a look of incredulity.

"Of course I am! Of course I'm scared! Haven't you noticed where we are?!"

She jabbed a finger at the mask, and then moved it to his face. "You always turn away the same way every time we get close to those things, and keep a hand in front of your throat like you think it's going to choke you. You always hold your breath when we pass by them, or when they get close, like some kind of habit."

"They're Gibdo. Of course I do! You know what they do to living creatures just as well as I do."

"Yeah, I know what they do," said Tatl, "but I don't know how they do it. You do. You're scared of them doing it to you, and in detail." She shook her head. "I don't think you're ready to find out what's up there. This is too much and too soon. We should leave."

He snarled and jammed the Gibdo Mask into his bag. "If that was what you wanted to discuss with me, you could have brought it up before I made it all the way through the well!"

"You didn't give me a chance!" Tatl cried. We went to the store so you could buy," she gestured to the labyrinth, "The ferryman's dues, I guess, but you didn't say anything about coming back here until you tooted your flute-"

"It's an ocarina," he rebutted.

"-and suddenly we were back on Ikana Hill, and you were halfway down the ladder to the freaky cursed well with monsters crawling in it and stuffing me in your hat! I didn't think interrupting the negotiations between you and a bunch of demanding, malicious, waterlogged corpses was a smart move!"

He wiped his face with a taught hand, and gathered himself.

"We're here now," he reasoned, with a growing fire in his voice, "so while I realize in retrospect you might not have been on board for this, I would rather not back down at this critical juncture. Alright?!"

Tatl chimed and blocked his way up the ladder. "What if you miss your meeting with Anju?! Huh? What about that? Have you given up on helping her?!"

"That isn't for twelve hours and fifty-three minutes, Tatl!"

"What if this holds you up for twelve hours and fifty-four minutes?! Huh?!"

"Then she'll still be there, as she always runs ten minutes late for the meeting anyway!"

Tatl scrunched her mouth into a knot beneath her wide-eyed, infuriated stare. "Well," she vamped, "what if this takes thirteen hours and four minutes to get through?!"

"Tatl!" he shouted, and his voice reverberated against the walls of the well like an explosion before shooting into the silent courtyard of air above them.

He covered his mouth and looked to the top of the well in horror. Tatl came close and scanned the room around them.

They waited five minutes. Nothing burst from the ground or jumped from the top of the well to drag them back to their undead den.

He uncovered his mouth and snapped at her again, but in a fierce hush this time. "I have done this before! You were even there a few times, so stop questioning me about this!"

"Yeah, but never in places like this!"

"Like this?!" He gestured to the earthen walls. "Like the well?!"

"Yes," said Tatl, with emphasis. "Like the well! You haven't-!"

"Yes, I have!" he growled. "Why do you think I know how the Gibdo try and kill you?!"

Tatl sniffed, horrified.

The last well he found himself at the bottom of had also been a house of the dead. There was a meaning to that he didn't quite understand: the water, the darkness, the isolation. He'd followed the spirits until they brought him to a bloodstained crossmark upon the ground, and then he fell through the floor to find hungry corpses waiting to rip him into pieces. He remembered paintings finished in blood, and images of faces too horrible to comprehend.

To this day, he had no idea if any of it was real or not. The only real thing to him about the memory was a set of yellowed, elongated teeth, and long, bloody nails, and hands, and teeth, and eyeless sockets, and hands, and hands, and hands, and teeth.

"I've done it enough," he said, and moved Tatl out of his way.

She reared back and butted heads with him.

"Ow! What was-?!"

"Are you a moron?! Put on a mask of Ikana!" Tatl commanded. "If you're going into a tomb, wear a death mask like everyone else. Yeesh! Have some decorum. Or haven't you done this kind of thing before?" She flew up and peeked over the well's mouth.

He glared at her, but pulled out the Captain's Hat anyway.

"All clear," she said, and signaled him upwards.

He climbed, and surfaced the well without incident.

The old castle was two levels of intricately carved brick made from the same clay that shaped the canyons around it, and the obvious scars in its stone walls spoke clearly of wartime destruction. The borders around the tops of the walls still held the remains of their original turquoise and crimson stain, and gold flecks glimmered in the complicated, criss-crossing mosaic of the pavement sprawling from the castle's grand entrance and butting against the closed gate. However, while the gate was firmly shut, the castle's doorway gaped like the expectant maw of a hungry, red-lipped beast. It stood open as if someone was expecting the two of them.

"There's one right here," said Tatl. "A Garo. They got inside the walls before they ate it. I can feel it."

She landed on his shoulder and tapped the skull faceplate of the Captain's Hat. "Good choice. Be careful which face you wear, because both sides are watching you, now."

He looked around. In the castle yard, the noonday sun spread uninhibited across the canyon and held the shadows at bay. But inside the castle's throat was a pointed, unknown darkness.

He inhaled it. It was stale and musty in his lungs. The castle had no defenses beyond the gate, not really, but it reeked of danger, and of pride. It had stood this long under Ikana's banner, and it expected to keep standing until the end of time.

Tatl fluttered from his shoulder and to the doorway until the castle almost swallowed her light completely, and then turned around. She was on the border of the known and the unknown, as the two of them so often were in Termina.

"Whenever you're ready," she said.

He took a breath and stepped inside.

Tatl's light crested the grooves of the geometric patterns coating the walls in patches as they walked. He knew their shape from the walls of Clock Town, but their original color was a mystery with only the harsh contrast of Tatl's white light and retreating black shadow guiding his eyes.

Once, Granny described this kingdom as painted. Ikana Hill used to be every color of the rainbow, and the faces carved in the rock of their temples were both vibrant and terrible. Now, they were only earth. Now, they were barely ghosts. Time had stripped the canyon's skin away to show bleeding, red-brown muscle, and would one day bleach it until Ikana Hill was nothing but a dry, crumbling, white skeleton. The rivers would stop flowing through here, and without them holding the land together, the four worlds of Termina would fall apart from one another, never to meet again.

Something in front of them moved.

Tatl illuminated the area immediately around them, and then shrieked at what she found.

A corpse. No. Four corpses, all in wooden masks with two carved, empty holes for eyes, and a third at the mouth. Funeral masks. The simplest ones. The Happy Mask Salesman lent him one in the past before these three days. He said the three holes meant something. He said that, even beyond Hyrule, there was great meaning in threes.

These corpses were moving. Every remaining cord and muscle in their rotting bodies tightened and pulled on one another as they tottered towards the source of the light in a mindless wave. They craned their heads towards him, and drew closer, closer, and the teeth behind their wooden mask-mouths opened wide.

First, they would shriek. It would shake the walls and trap him within his own fears. Then, they would grab him. They would wrap their limbs around him and choke the life from his body so that they could consume it breath for breath, until he lived no more. They would give his corpse a mask with three holes. They would give his corpse a hunger. He would become one of them.

He drew his sword, and willed himself not to back away.

When they came within range, and before they screamed, he would slice through the knees of the first one and leave its body as an obstruction to the other three. He would toss gunpowder on them, flee to the castle's entrance, and fire a flaming arrow inside the castle's mouth.

This is what he thought he would do, but to his surprise, he never had to. The corpses bowed to him, and then, they began to dance.

"...It's the mask," said Tatl, finally. "You've come as a friend. You've come with Keeta's authority."

He gave the dead dancers a wide berth. "Tatl, can you cast off any more light for me?"

"Yeah, sure, but don't ask me to move around while I do it."

He guarded his eyes for her initial blast, and then read the room.

Four columns, just as intricately carved as the walls, held the castle's high ceiling aloft. Twin doors flanked the grand entryway on the left and right, but more importantly, a one-eyed sun relief examined him from the wall in the very center of the room with a curious, insolent stare. Light. They needed sunlight.

"Alright, Tatl," he said. "That's enough. We'll go left, and try and find a way to the roof."

He cast a wary eye over the pirouetting corpses, and then took off through his chosen doorway, Tatl in tow.

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

Ikana's death came for the kingdom during a siege, and if the palace's exterior condition was any indication, the royal family was on the losing end. The inner hallways fared little better: bits of the ceiling had fallen to the floor, and some of the columns had buckled from some unknown blunt force to the outside. The painted tile floors ended in illogical, jagged edges, and in some places fell through all the way to the foundation deep within the ground.

Something told him that, should he fall into the chasm, he would never make it back out.

Tatl kept her eyes on the hallways at eye level.

"Skulls," she said. "The interior decorators for this place made it their mission to make all of the patterns on the trim skulls. Your mask is a skull and a skeleton stuck together." Tatl shook her head. "I understand this place has a ritualistic relationship with death, but I can't say I have any respect for the lengths their culture takes it to."

Tatl was wrong- or, rather, she was half-wrong. Ancient Ikana held a ritualistic relationship with time and stages representative of its passing, including death. Captain Keeta's hat was the visage of a skeleton because he represented war and strife. He commanded men to their death, one way or another, and beyond it. His opposite, an ambassador, maybe, would not wear something so gruesome. He and Tatl were only witnessing one side of the story.

Granny's portrayal of Ikana was a cautionary tale about the consequences of abusing the cycle for selfish gains. The kingdom fed Majora to solidify their position as the most prosperous kingdom in all of Termina for centuries, and so their ensuing misfortune- centuries as an undead wasteland- was proportionate to that. Death without end was their justice, and the ruined kingdom's cursed fixation on it only supported the emphasis on the necessity of the cyclical change between life and death. Their single-minded suffering perpetuated more single-minded suffering, but they had no way out of it once it began.

Ikana's surviving progeny upheld the celebration of the traditional passing of ages and seasons in three days, during a carnival at the very center of their world.

"What do you think this place looked like when it was alive?" he asked Tatl.

"I dunno," she said. "A lot of pomp and circumstance, I guess. Probably not all that different."

Shards of sunlight fought through the beaten brick of the outer hallways, and he could see enough of it to start piecing it together: red, turquoise, green, and gold covered over everything, and beneath their pigment, bold tile patterns, geometric reliefs, and stylized creatures populated the walls, the ceiling, the floor. Green Chu grinned at him from the relief on the doors, and other creatures- creatures native to thriving forests and fertile valleys instead of barren canyons- thrived in the murals hanging on the walls. They danced in the ample glow of the torches around them, and gleaming mirrors set behind the flames amplified the light so that no corner was left in shadow.

"No," he said. "I saw a kingdom's fate after seven years in ruins. It was already almost unrecognizable after so short a time. This place was probably incredible before it fell."

"Uh-huh. Seven years." Tatl nodded. "And how old are you?"

He stopped walking, and thought about it.

"You know, I don't know," he said, after a minute.

Tatl chimed. "Creepy," she said.

She said the same thing when they rounded a corner and found another set of corpse dancers performing in greeting at the foot of a grand, spiraling stairwell.

"Wel-come," they moaned. "Wel-come."

Their shadows fell behind them in the face of Tatl's glow and increased their numbers to twice as many.

"You have... returned to us," they said, "victorious. Victorious. You are... victorious."

Tatl covered her mouth. "The captain. They've been waiting for Keeta to save them. He was the hero of this land, like Mikau and Darmani were for the north and west."

She forgot the Deku child to the south, but he would forgive her. He gently pulled her from the air and guided through the forest of corpses and shadows until they climbed the stairs and the dancers were well behind them. Keeta's mask shielded his eyes as they emerged into open sunlight.

The castle roof showed the repercussions of war even more keenly now that he was standing upon it. Shattered boulders littered the checkerboard tile, and deep, cracked depressions marked their initial point of impact. The enemy never broke through the castle's thick ceiling and into the heart of the fortress, but they would have, given more time. They would have, if they had been given the advantage of three days to manipulate at will.

In particular, one of the craters struck directly over the castle's entry chamber, where the first set of dancers lurked under the watch of the sun insignia. He glanced at the sky, though he didn't need to. It was 2:25 in the afternoon, and the sun was just beyond its highest point directly above them.

"You know," Tatl said, "In order to save them, we're going to have to betray them." She fluttered out of his hands and looked over at the ruined ceiling, and then back to him.

He kneeled down and gently produced the sacs of gunpowder from his bag. "Yes."

"Are you sure that you want to do this?" she asked. "I know they're already dead, but…"

"This is a kingdom surviving only in the shadows," he said. "But to do what Keeta has asked of us, to stop this nonsense, we've got to let the light in."

He spaced the gunpowder sacs around the circumference of the crater, and then piled the rest in the center. Then, he took one, untied it, and connected the sacs with a trail of powder from the inside. He was excruciatingly careful to keep it off his hands. It only took one mishap to blow him sky high along with the bombs.

"Do you," said Tatl, "think that there might have been two heroes in this story?"

He emerged from the crater and hid behind the remains of a shattered wall while he strung his bow. "How do you mean?"

She rubbed her arms. "The Garo. It was the Garo that the man at the front of the canyon wanted you to save. It was the Garo's Mask that deemed you worthy to enter into the canyon. So," she bit her lip, "do you think the canyon would still be in ruins if the Garo had actually taken Ikana Hill? Do you think whoever owned the Garo's Mask was the hero of the east?"

He came here under Keeta's banner to do the Garo's bidding and storm Ikana Castle. He was painfully aware of it. He called Tatl behind him, and drew his bow with a flaming arrow.

"I think the story would have ended the same no matter who won," he said, and fired into the web of explosives.

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

 **Author's Note: The first official dungeon crawl of the story! Anyway, I hope you enjoyed it. Please don't forget to comment, ask your questions, or voice your concerns. :) As always, thanks for reading and reviewing!**


	17. Blast Mask

He closed the door to the Stock Pot Inn and rubbed at his skull through his skin until he erased Anju's hopeful, haunted face from the backs of his eyelids. Her crimson letter peeked out of his tunic like an ill-placed wound.

"You should take a break," said Tatl.

She was probably right. He rubbed at his eyes again and thought about returning to the Knife Chamber to sleep, but the thought of listening to Anju and her mother bicker through the walls made his heart wrench in his chest.

Igos du Ikana had blessed him with a soldier with no heart. He wished there was a way he could set it to work escorting Kafei to his fiancé instead, but all the damn thing did was stand there and offer a shallow reflection of who he pretended to be. It was utterly useless for something like this.

His feet started the route to the park at the north of town. Tatl didn't stop him.

The night of the first day was as in denial about time's end as the rest of the four worlds. It was still, tranquil, and fell over Clock Town like a star-studded black veil even as his thoughts threatened to rupture his skull and fly shrieking into it.

The mayor's residence- Aroma's home, Dotour's home, Kafei's home- bordered the eastern neighborhoods and the park. It was no fortress like Hyrule's castle or Ikana's palace. In fact, it was underwhelming from the outside. Like most of Clock Town, it reinforced and the walls and earth surrounding it. The pattern of white paint measuring out the wooden facade unified it with the surrounding brick, but left no room for windows or finishes beyond a carved placard by the door and the mayoral mask hanging above the door.

The mask represented Dotour's public face for years, and probably meant something to the old kingdom before it stood in for the office, but his wife's family crest was even older: the metal silhouette of a crouching man with hands on either side of his gemstone mask. It shaped one of Aroma's rings, held together the neckerchiefs of the ghostly composer brothers in Ikana, and decorated the front of Igos' collar, and that of his soldiers. Tatl had noticed.

The two of them paid no mind to the heated voices carrying through the estate's enclosed back garden and into the plaza. Viscen and Mutoh would either resolve their argument before the Carnival's deadline, or the moon above would do it for them.

The northern park was sparse. The twins- the juggling twins, not the Rosa Sisters- mentioned that there should be petting zoos, merchants, grocers, and artisans lining the dirt paths and kicking up the grass to attract the inbound pilgrims making their way to the Carnival from the town's northern gate. Instead, there was an empty playground, a tree, a sleeping guard, and Jim's lonely balloon tangled up, unmarred, in its branches. Tingle had long moved on to chart the stagnant waters of the southern swamp even though the Great Fairy's spring was nestled in the hill at the western edge of the park.

Of course, not even she had the power to grant companion fairies to the unworthy, so perhaps he was wise to leave her.

He and Tatl followed the path, and sat down at the spring's entrance to watch the grass barely sway in the thin breeze.

"Why here?" asked Tatl, in a way that made it clear his answer was optional.

He indulged her. "Green hat. Green clothes." He gestured to the field. "It's not a forest, and it's barely a field, but it's here."

Tatl rested her head on her hands, and her elbows on her knees. "Huh." She pushed her bangs off her forehead with a puff of air. "How many times can we do this?"

He blinked at the empty park. "Do what?"

She twirled her hand in a circle. "Do this. Again and again."

He asked himself that a long time ago, when he first realized that, with each replacement of the Master Sword in its pedestal, he was bridging the gap of seven years between child and adult, and changing it with each step.

"If a circle completes itself once, it completes itself an infinite number of times," he said.

"Cryptic." Tatl snorted. "Figures."

He pulled out his sword and carved a circle in the dirt. "Pretend this is a river," he said.

"Rivers don't run in circles," argued Tatl. "That's a moat, or a lake, if it floods the center. And anyway, it's stagnant. It's not running at all." She crossed her arms. "Not a river."

"Exactly," he said, and drew a line in a tangent against the edge of the circle. "It's in a reservoir holding back the waters. Beavers, Deku, Zora, Gorons, Hylians, Gerudo, Humans. Only mortals trap a river in such a way. And why do they do that?"

"To hold it until they can redirect the river how they want it to go," said Tatl. She sighed. "I get it, I get it. Your magic instrument—"

"Ocarina."

"Your magic flute—"

" _Ocarina_."

"Your magic piccolo is the dam," Tatl said. "The repeating three days are the reservoir, and we're keeping it that way until the new track for the river to follow is ready."

"And it's the same three days," he said. "The reservoir can't overflow. It's always the same three days- the same water, with nothing added to it. Unless we willfully open the dam, meaning, unless we willfully stop reversing time, it will never change. There is no doubt."

Tatl slouched deeper, like she might melt into the grass, and then sat up straight with a sudden chime.

"Look," she said, pointing.

He looked.

An old woman- the woman from the Bomb Shop in the western thoroughfare, who doted on her son and gave out sparklers to the children on the third day, who talked about building a ship to take her to the moon, who smelled like cookies and gunpowder- entered the park from the northern gate with a sack slung over her shoulder. What she was doing out so late was anyone's guess, but soon a grinning, malignant shadow appeared at her heels.

"It's Sakon," Tatl said.

The man was a predator, and a starving one. Clock Town should have been full of easy marks for trivial scams at this time of year, but it wasn't. The town was empty, and that thieving smile wasn't so much a charismatic mask as it was the desperate grimace of hyena fixated on the kill. His leather shoes made no sound on the dirt path, and his knife hand barely moved as he readied himself to strike.

A wave of latent anger pulsed through his veins the same as it had when he saw Kafei in the canyon. Sakon's face filled his head with steam and coated the inside of his mouth with steel. He could feel the canyon river at his back again, pushing him after Sakon, pushing him towards death.

Kafei's absence was Sakon's fault. Anju's grief was his fault. Aroma's desperation and the destructive fury of Anju's mother were his fault. The stupid thief never thought about any of his actions with the intent to cause any of those consequences, but his eradication would have swiftly solved them all.

Sakon and the old woman had yet to notice him or Tatl on the far side of the park, and they crept to the side of the hill to keep it that way. Tatl hid her light in his hat.

Sakon closed the distance between himself and his mark, and in the next instant, the old woman's bag was cut from her hands, her body was on the ground, and Sakon was sprinting towards the open northern gate with his most recent acquisition.

"Stop!" The old woman cried, but her voice was too worn and blown-out to even rouse the guard snoring in Sakon's path.

Honestly, it didn't matter, because a sudden arrow sliced through the lazy park air and wedged itself deep into Sakon's shoulder. He dropped the bag and tumbled headfirst into the ground.

Tatl zipped out after the arrow, and blinded Sakon with a sudden flash of white-hot light. The thief shrieked and fought her off with a clod of dirt from beneath his undulating body, and then struggled to pick himself up.

Sakon's pale skin and white shirt made him look like a maggot- a writhing, frightened, disgusting maggot, with his mouth wide open and his arms raking through the dirt for anything he could take hold of and burrow into.

Tatl's companion emerged from around the hill, and spooked the thief with the ring of steel from his sword scraping against his sheath. Sakon finally dragged himself to his feet and hobbled- half blinded, off balanced, and still smiling- to the northern gate.

Tatl and her counterpart watched him go.

Then, she said, "I can't believe you shot him in the arm."

He reached down and picked up the straps of the forgotten bag. "I almost got him in the head. Would that have surprised you more, or less?"

Tatl opened her mouth, and then thought better of it as she stroked her chin and furrowed her brows.

Behind them, the old woman regained her bearings, dusted herself off, and met them halfway on the path.

"Thank you," she said, with a wrinkly smile. The deep blue of her vest almost vibrated in the moonlight beneath her silver-grey hair. In her hands was a black, head-sized disk with a three-toothed, crooked-eyed skull painted in the center of it.

"Since he didn't make off with them, our shop can finally stock something new for a change. Maybe I'll put 'em out tomorrow!" The old woman chuckled and held out the disk for him to trade for the bag.

He and Tatl looked from it to her, and then back to it.

She pushed it into his open hand. "Yes, I must thank you," she said. "It's a dangerous mask, but maybe you could use it to throw your own festival fireworks show."

He and Tatl shared a look.

Then, the old woman grinned, and showed off two protruding incisors. "I see your sword, and I saw you shoot that arrow. You seem like the kind of boy who knows how to handle strange and dangerous things. It's like this mask was made for you!"

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

 **Author's Note: As always, thank you for reading! An extra-special thank you to this who review!**


	18. Stone Mask

Come ten o'clock, Kafei dared not move from his station in the Curiosity Shop backroom. He merged his face with the grinning mask upon the wall and gave it seeing eyes.

"We're still gonna help you," said Tatl, "but are you sure you really need this mask? Anju seemed glad just to know that you were coming for her." Her body pressed a starburst of wrinkles into the soft fabric of the pillow on the backroom bed. She yawned.

Stalwart Kafei's answer was no different this time or any time someone asked him that same question. "I must reclaim that mask. I promised Anju- as a child, as her fiance, and in my letters. I must do this."

Tatl turned to her partner, who chose to wear a mask identical to Kafei's from a different set of three days, and shrugged as if to say, "Told you so. Same as always."

Except, he knew something was different- something fundamental to the sequencing of events. He crossed his arms and tapped out an impatient rhythm against the floor.

He had long since given up on convincing Kafei not to wait for Sakon. Instead, this was the plan: when Sakon arrived, he would shoot an arrow through the wide eyes of the mask on the wall, and pin the thief down. Nevermind that it would be the second time in as many days that Sakon had been shot by the same archer.

But that was the difference. Sakon had never been shot in the cycles before. Killed from a terrible spill down a waterfall, yes, but never shot.

Tatl checked the clock on the wall across from her, even though she could have saved herself the trouble by asking aloud. It was 5:24 am.

Tatl glanced between her companion and Kafei. "What time does this guy usually show up?"

"Any time," said Kafei. "It varies. But he'll be here. I'm sure of it."

Kafei was alone in his confidence. Prior experience said he appeared between the hours of 3:00 am and dawn, and that window was rapidly closing. The sun was beginning to rise over the low horizon in the ravines of the eastern canyon. He could almost feel it.

"He's not coming," he said.

"He will," said Kafei. "He's got to. There's no way he would miss an opportunity to profit from his spoils- from my mask, specifically."

"Oh, yeah?" asked Tatl. "That thing made of solid gold, or something? Mother-of-pearl inlays? I know you humans have fixations on that kind of thing."

"It doesn't matter. He's not coming tonight," he repeated.

"Then, he will come tomorrow night!" Kafei assured. "He must. Don't you see?! The Carnival is in three days, but there is no one else here to buy what he steals! No one! His only option is the Curiosity Shop! He will come here!"

"Unless he thinks he'll get caught," Tatl said, and hurled a sharp stare at the bow on her companion's back. "Right?"

He nodded.

Kafei pulled away from the mask on the wall. "What? Shoot him?"

"So?" Tatl asked. "You gonna turn back time and try again, or what?"

Kafei looked from fairy to boy. "Turn back time? What are you talking about?"

"Not yet," he said. "We'll go to the canyon and see where he is. Some _other_ event may have happened _because_ I shot him rather than him disappearing just because I shot him."

Tatl buffed her nails against her shoulder. "Fine, fine. We leaving now?"

He nodded and turned for the door. Tatl levitated from the bed and followed him out the door to the laundry pool.

The two of them made it halfway down the path to the southern plaza when a great clatter rang out through the laundry pool and Kafei appeared in its wake. He kicked up a cloud of dust as he ran after them.

"Wait!" he called. "What is this about turning back time?! Did you shoot Sakon?! Do you know where he is?!"

Tatl took shelter in her companion's hat. "Shake him," she said.

They darted to the southern plaza, wove their way through the construction detritus, and shook him.

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

Sakon's hideout was sealed and quiet. The canyon was quiet, too, save the wind. He and Tatl poured over the striated rock walls and rain-eaten ruins for some kind of sign that Sakon was here, and that he was whole. No proof of the latter and no proof of the former came forward.

When they exhausted the hiding holes just below the crown of Ikana Hill, they worked inwards, past the old battlefields and towards Clock Town. Nothing, nothing, nothing.

No news is often good news, but this left him with a hole in the pit of his stomach. This was an unknown suspended in a fixed three days of known. He familiarized himself with Termina's web of hours so thoroughly that any strands of uncertainty ensnared him like a spider does a fly.

If Sakon never returned here, where would he be? Could he have died? How? From what? Was the arrow in his shoulder all it took? What danger- what active, hungry danger- crept through Termina's fields if not the moon above or the temples at the four corners of this world? What delivered death so punctually into these isolated three days?

Was it him?

Suddenly, he tripped. He tripped on thin air.

"Nice," said Tatl, from her place above his sprawled body.

He brought himself to his feet, and then stretched his arms out around himself.

"What are you doing?" Tatl asked.

His eyes were blind to anything besides canyon rock, but his hand hit a warm, solid mass. He rapped his knuckles against it. Whatever it was, it was still there.

And then, it said, "Ow."

Tatl chimed.

The Mask of Truth could see into hearts and minds, but the Eye of Truth could see the unseen. He stumbled backwards and pulled it from his bag.

A man in a soldier's uniform and a misshapen stone mask sat in front of him. He rubbed his unarmored arm where his discoverer struck him.

"Well?" said Tatl. "What is it?! Is it Sakon?"

Beneath his breastplate, helmet, and mask, the soldier's emaciated, dirty, and sunburnt form shivered from even the slightest gust blowing through the canyon. He'd been here long before the three day cycle began, and his swelling ankle suggested he would be there long afterwards, assuming there was a canyon for him to occupy.

"No," he said, and passed the Eye in front of Tatl so she could see.

"Oh," she said. "Definitely not."

The Stone Mask's uneven eyes peered between the two of them. "Oh," he said. "Can you see me?"

"No, we're just staring at this one specific place in the canyon," said Tatl. "Yes, we can see you! What did you think we were doing?! Just doing a bit? Punching the air for fun and games?!"

"I'm shocked," the soldier said. "You're the first person who's ever spoken to me here."

Tatl snorted, and then started mothering over him and his gnarled leg in her aggressive, backhanded way.

"Well, I don't think you've been getting around a whole lot lately, so that isn't saying much." She gestured to all of him. "Are you afraid of taking care of yourself? Is that why you look like a corpse? Or are you trying to add to the ambience?" she opened her arms to the canyon. "Didn't think it was openly haunted enough?"

The soldier shrank into his breastplate. "It's 'cause I'm about as impressive as a stone."

Tatl's companion searched his gear. He bought a bottle of medicine at the beginning of every cycle because it was never not useful. An infinite surplus of time also meant an infinite surplus of money, so it was never expensive. The soldier was grateful, and, should he and Tatl bring medicine every three days, would create an infinite surplus of gratitude, too.

The soldier- Shiro, he called himself- was the last Clock Town guard, and representative of new authority hedging the old in the canyon: he was unnoticeable, unimportant, and weak in body and presence. Neither Shiro nor his establishment could hope to take back the Kingdom of the Dead.

He looked to the top of the canyon wall. A figure in purple hung over the side like a gnarled tree clinging to the edge of the precipice. Their red eyes glimmered beneath their hood. They were the real gatekeeper, and they acted with the authority of both Ikana and her invaders.

"What are you looking at?" Shiro asked.

"Nothing," he said.

Shiro was, in a manner of speaking, also representative of nothing. However, neither he nor Tatl had ever noticed him before in all their days of memorizing the machinations of the four worlds. Like Sakon, Shiro was another unknown, and wielding the flow of time and individual choices of people had little room for mysteries.

Kaepora Gaebora, the spirit guide, said that, when they first met in this dream, this land was destined to fade unless someone changed that destiny. Hyrule was a nebulous unknown in desperate need of help, but Termina sucked him in like an oyster and its fate he meticulously smoothed, perfected, and jealously protected like a pearl inside its mouth. He had control of these three days, and only these unknowns could upend it.

What else had he overlooked?

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

 **Author's Note:** A short one this time. Thank you as always to those who read and review!


	19. Kamaro's Mask

Late at night, when the blue will o' wisp flames of the world beyond dotted Termina field and marked the many paths to death, a lone figure danced in the light of the moon. He was nimble, lithe, and dedicated to his art even as the morning sun's light washed him away with each new day. The ghost Kamaro emerged every midnight without fail, as he had for hundreds of years.

"Oh, moon," he lamented, the same as he always had, "Oh, moon…"

When he moved, his technique was same as the shadows of the corpses in Ikana Castle. When he spoke, his words came out in verses of poetry like an old scroll. He sang:

" _I am no longer part of the living._

 _My sadness to the moon._

 _I haven't left my dance to the world._

 _I am full of regret."_

His body completed the first act of his dance, and the ghostly white pupils floating in his puckered, empty eye sockets roamed over his audience of two.

When they didn't react, he cleared his throat.

Tatl and her companion blinked at Kamaro with an uncultured vacancy.

Kamaro repeated the last move of his dance. "Translation," he said, pointedly, "I am disappointed, oh moon. I have died!"

"Oh!" Tatl got it. She brought her hands together and applauded, and then smacked her companion on the head to make him do the same.

Kamaro soaked it in until he was satisfied, and then began his dance anew with a wide pirouette.

" _Oh, I planned to bring the world together_

 _and stir it into a giant melting pot with my dance!_

 _If only I had taught my dance to someone."_

Kamaro landed and stared at his audience, expectant.

He cleared his throat in his audience's silence, and repeated the verse's last line:

" _If only I had taught my dance to_ _ **someone**_ _,"_ he intoned.

Tatl pinched her companion.

"I can't dance," he said.

Kamaro's narrow mouth turned down at the corners, and the wrinkles running from his nose to his lips deepened. He looked to the fairy.

"No way," said Tatl. "You don't want to put any kind of responsibility on me." She pointed. "This is your boy."

"Tatl, this really is not my area at all," he said.

"You want to help the Rosa Sisters, or not?"

"Can't we bring him into Clock Town and ask him to teach them directly?"

Kamaro lamented:

" _My soul is in torment!_

 _At the base of the mountain I fell_

 _As I danced across the four worlds._

 _The moves are my muse, but the grave is my keeper."_

He cleared his throat, again. "Translation: I died here! cannot leave this-"

"We get it," said Tatl. "We've got to learn your dance." She turned to her companion. "Learn the dance."

"R-right," he said, and made like he was ready to actually do it.

Then, he froze. He'd forgotten the first step the moment he'd seen it. Once, a princess laughed at him when he tried to dance. He never wanted to see her again. This wasn't why he left, but still.

Now, Tatl was laughing at him, Majora above the Clock Tower was laughing at him, and the moon was grimacing in secondhand embarrassment. His collar grew hot and his tongue felt thick.

"Ah, s-show me again?" He half-smiled. "Please?"

Kamaro's sigh expressed the long and suffering frustration of a paragon doomed to work exclusively with mediocrity for the rest of his days. He began his dance anew, but turned away to face the glaring moon.

" _Oh, I planned to bring the world together_

 _and stir it into a giant melting pot with my dance!_

 _If only I had taught my dance to someone worthy."_

"Hey!" shouted Tatl. She wasn't laughing, after all. "Don't look away when someone is talking to you! He's willing to learn your crappy dance, so be grateful!"

"Oh, moon!" wailed Kamaro, mortally dramatic, even in death.

An ocarina's crystal voice matched his pitch. Kamaro stopped, transfixed.

"Oh, now you're interested," goaded Tatl with a sneer. "If I had a magic clarinet, people might take me seriously, too," she muttered.

Its musician parted it from his lips and looked up.

"I cannot dance as well as you, but," he swallowed, "I have- I have other talents. There is still a way I can pass on your vision."

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

 **Author's Note:** Just something short to break it up. It's pretty straightforward, but I always thought Kamaro was pretty funny and I wanted to include him. Thanks for reading and reviewing (and remember, if you aren't signed in, I can't respond to you!)


	20. Circus Leader's Mask

"You've been three people," said Tatl. "You've been three different people, and you're about to be a fourth. They haven't even noticed." Tatl chuckled.

The Bar Latte's purple-pink lights bathed its stage and staircase in gauzy ambiance. On the floor below both, sober, bug-eyed Toto and inebriated, heavy-lidded Gorman fought to hold their ground in the presence of the other. The former: a band manager eclipsing catastrophe in his twilight years; the latter: an emerging leader shriveling in the harsh dawn of his career.

The bartender polished a glass from behind the micah studded bartop with one dewy eye on the two of them, and then another on Tatl and her mysterious companion. The towering copper and glass tanks at his back held plaques above their taps- Chateau Romani araka, koumis, cream- but they held pale purple-pink light instead of anything to drink. The tourists may not be around, but the locals certainly had no problem letting the moon pressure them into becoming patrons in their place.

Cremia's delivery was scheduled for tomorrow. She wouldn't make it.

The bartender watched as Darmani's mask came off beneath the shadows of the bar's entrance and leave a Hylian boy behind. He'd seen his young customer become a Deku child, the Deku child become Mikau, and Mikau become Darmani. Provided Toto and Gorman didn't notice, any real obfuscation would be disingenuous.

Tatl re-emerged with her companion, now disguised only as himself, and spared the bartender a nod as they approached Toto.

"Excuse me, sir," her companion said. "I understand you were conducting a sound check? I can play, should you need me."

"He plays clarinet," interjected Tatl.

"Ocarina," he corrected.

"Like I said. Flute."

"Ocarina."

"Oboe."

"Ocarina," he emphasized.

"Yup. Pipes."

He paused. That was true, in a sense. The ocarina became a set of pipes in the Deku child's hands, yes.

Then, suddenly, it occurred to him that Tatl may actually believe that the instrument changed forms for everyone who played it, on its own whim. He turned to her with a question behind his pursed lips.

Toto's flippered tail swished behind his bent back. "Ah. Yes, yes." He looked to the stage. "You play ocarina? Could you take the center for me, please?"

Tatl snickered as the two of them took the stairs.

"Again! He fell for it _again!_ "

He stuffed her into his hat and looked to Toto.

"Wonderful," said Toto. "You're melody, so you'll play this for me." He produced a piece of parchment from his vest and pointed at the five-line ledger spreading across its surface, just as he had with all the other parts. "Think you can do that?"

He squinted at it from the stage apron, and felt his skin turn to ice. Mikau could read music, Darmani could read music, and even the Deku child could, to a degree, but without their help, he was left with only scraps of lessons taught to him by the princess, and by Navi. He'd forgotten who he was, and who he wasn't. As himself, he knew very, very little.

He might have been called hero in the mouths of people who barely knew him, but, truthfully, without someone else to hide behind, he was naked, and squirming in his own skin.

"I," he said, swallowing, "I have to hear it."

From the bar, Gorman guffawed. The lights from the bar flashed from pink, to teal, to red, and dyed his ruffled collar and embroidered sleeves so they matched the flush of his cheeks.

"Stupid kid can't even sight read!" he said. "Amateurs! Ha!" He slammed his fist on the bartop. "The great Toto, reduced to working with a snot-nosed kid who couldn't even recite his alphabet if he tried!" He slammed his hand again. "Ha! Ha ha! Ahahahaha!"

Toto's bulbous eyes closed in slow agitation.

Gorman was right. The blacktop of the stage may as well have been a void swallowing him whole. He knew all the letters, and he knew how to use them, but nobody ever gave him an order to put them in.

He grew up a child of the forest, and then a maverick abomination- not a Hylian child, and certainly not with an education. He could gut a rampaging beast, make medicine out of every herb and berry in the Kokiri forest, and identify every poisonous mushroom in the Woods on sight, but he couldn't tell you their names. At least, not with names anyone outside of the Kokiri would recognize.

He knew a lifetime of things, but he had no way to communicate them to anyone else. He was ephemeral, faceless, nameless, voiceless. He was a legend passed down in vague whispers, and nothing more.

"Stupid kid," said Gorman. "Playing at fantasies like you think you're hot shit."

Tatl emerged. "Shut up," she told Gorman. Her voice was as clear as a bell, and just as alarming.

"Make me!"

Tatl turned to Toto. "He can play. Let him hear it."

Gorman harrumphed and turned his stool so his back was to the stage. It complained with an awesome and temperamental creak.

Toto blinked, once. Slowly. The tiny, metallic fins resting on his flat upper lip reflected the lights like sheets of glass. On a human, they might have been called a moustache.

"Alright," said Toto, and he croaked out four notes.

A long time ago- a year ago, but also seven- Saria used her ocarina as her voice. Anything she sang, she could mimic in pitch perfectly. Anything the birds sang, she could play with skill. Anything anyone ever said to her, she could express the heart of it without a single word. The Kokiri revered her. They whispered that she was so good, she could make the heaviest heart forget its troubles and dance like a feather on the wind. She was so good, she could enchant the dark heart of the Lost Woods. She was so good, they said, that the entire world would have no choice but to preserve her talent forever and ever and ever.

She said that, as good as she was, her dearest friend and protege was even better. He was so good, he could hear the music in the trees before the wind even asked them to make a sound. He was so good, he dreamed that color and song were one. He was so good, he could pry out the song trapped in someone's heart without a word, if you let him.

He was so good, they feared him. That was when his ocarina was only basic, earthen clay, not royal and mysterious blue.

He was given the first four notes, but when he finished them, he didn't stop. He finished the phrase, and he would have kept going had he not opened his eyes to find Tatl, Toto, and the bartender staring wide-eyed and open-mouthed at him.

Then, Gorman's glass clinked on the counter, and the spotlight fell to his turned back.

"Oh," he said. "That melody…"

Slowly, gradually, his shoulders began to shake, and sobs floated from his mouth. "That melody!" He hung his head. "That melody brings back… so many memories."

Toto turned his eyes to Gorman, and something like a smile pulled at his lips. From across the counter, the bartender mirrored him.

"Toldja he could play," Tatl said. Then, she flitted to her companion's side.

"You really do have strange powers," she whispered. "I've seen you make yourself into empty shells, but they've never moved before. How did you do that?"

He blinked. "Do what?"

She frowned. "On stage. There were four of you. Or, well, one in the form of every mask. You began playing the Ballad, and they appeared out of nowhere."

"Oh," he said. Then, he said, "I don't know."

"Aren't you frightened?"

"Of what?"

Tatl gestured to the ocarina. "Of that. Of the instrument. Of your power. It's like the Song of Time- you said it used to not do what it does now. That instrument. You say it's an ocarina, but what if it isn't? It becomes pipes, drums, a guitar… doesn't that frighten you? The unpredictability of it?"

The Ocarina of Time was a gift imposed upon him against his will, and something he was obligated to return. The only thing he wanted less than the instrument itself was to face its rightful owner. However, he could no sooner have let the Skull Kid take off with it than he could strip himself of his own skin.

"It's something I cannot bear to have, but cannot bear to part with," he said.

Tatl snorted. "Cryptic," she said. "Figures."

"I can't explain it any better than that," he said. Just as he was a legend, so was it. It couldn't make a sound without someone to play it, and he was useless without a mouthpiece. If courage were a physical object, he felt sure it would be in the same shape and color.

"The point is," he said, "I can't get rid of it."

Whatever Gorman and Toto's conversation was about, they finished it. Gorman's chair creaked again as he turned from the bar. In his hands was a replica of his own tear-stained face.

"I'm sorry I booed you," said Gorman, and surrendered himself.

Tatl took the mask in with a judgmental stare. "What's with these creatives making masks of their own faces? First Kamaro, and now you. What kind of parent lets their kid grow up to have that kind of ego, huh?!"

He clamped a hand over Tatl's mouth- which almost knocked her out of the air- and accepted the mask.

"Thank you," he said.

Gorman nodded, and then turned back to the bar. "It's hard, leaving everything you know to go forge your own way," he muttered. "It's hard, making decisions for the people following you. It's all hard."

He couldn't speak to the latter, but the former, he knew all too well. Oh, wasn't it, though?

Toto patted Gorman on the back, and ordered a drink.

The bartender obliged, and then took up his task of polishing glasses. He kept one eye on his work, but the other was still on his little patron.

Tatl nudged her companion. He stepped forward.

"Um," he said, "that is, ah, excuse me. You wouldn't have happened to know of a thief- I mean, know of a grinning man named Sakon who frequents the neighborhood, would you?"

The bartender shook his head. "Sir, I would be happy to talk to you, but please. I must ask that you wear your proof of membership while in the establishment." His dewy eyes twinkled. "Latte is a serious establishment, you understand."

He scrambled for Romani's Mask, and hurriedly pulled it over his head. Tatl adjusted the black and white ears until it sat straight on his head and he could see beneath the snout.

The bartender's bushy moustache turned up on the left side as a lopsided grin spread across his face.

"Much better," he said.

* * *

 _ **Author's Note: Thank you so much for reading! We've covered more masks than I thought we had so far, huh! Anyways, as always, I appreciate your feedback. You guys keep this thing going!**_


	21. Mask of Scents

Romani's bow was flexible and well-made, but too small to allow her to shoot for any distance. He twanged the bowstring experimentally. He earned a flat, warped buzz.

"Romani made it herself," said Romani, proudly. "Except the decoration on the ends. Big Sis carved those."

"Uh-huh."

He took an arrow from his quiver, pulled it back, and then let it go when he feared the arms might break if he pulled them any harder. The arrow struggled through the air in a lazy arc, and popped the rust-red balloon hovering in front of the barn on the way down.

"What!" Romani pouted. "That one was for Romani! You already popped all the other ones!"

Tatl snickered and said, "Don't mind him. He's showing off!" and earned herself a swat with her companion's right hand.

She deftly maneuvered around it and to the back of his tunic, which she lifted, and then cackled maniacally when its frantic owner dropped everything to smooth it back down.

Romani, her dog, and Epona stared back, absolutely scandalized, until he sprang into the air like a grasshopper and pounced upon Tatl in comeuppance. She squawked from her place between the ground and his two cupped hands, and Romani burst into laughter.

"You twerp!" Tatl screamed, and squeezed herself to freedom from between two of her captor's fingers. "If you didn't have the tiny nostrils of such a little freak, I'd fly up your nose and kick you in the brain!"

In answer, he pulled out the Mask of Scents, put it on, aimed its huge snout in her face, and snorted.

Tatl didn't smell like much- she was, predominantly, an elemental spirit- but the ranch's pungent grass and latent manure musk hit him like a speeding cart.

Romani ranch was idyllic and fertile, and the gentle winds bustling across its vista carried only a hint of the distant lands beyond its fences. The ocean to the east was too warm, and the bordering swamp to the south was dying, but the water running through the veins of the fields between them had yet to feel the strain. Whether the Skull Kid intended to send Epona here or if it was some cosmic coincidence was a mystery, but this last secluded oasis in a landscape of quiet panic had cradled her even as the world rocked in the throes of the last three days. He was grateful to a cause he couldn't name.

He snorted again.

"Better?!" he demanded. It came out muffled from behind the mask's leather snoot and heavy fake brow.

Tatl punched the mask between the nostrils. He flicked his fingers at her. She slapped them back. He poked her away. Repeat.

Epona huffed at the two of them, and then ambled away for greener, serener pastures. Romani's terrier followed.

"A pig!" cried Romani. Her spitfire hair and ebullient voice erupted around her as she threw her arms into the air. "You hop around like a grasshopper, but your mask is like a pig!"

He turned the Mask of Scents's beady, black eyes and proud snout to face Romani, and gave another loud, ungraceful snort. This one was involuntary.

Romani fell into a fit of giggles so violent that she toppled off the crate and rolled into the fresh ranch grass. The broken blades on her white linen dress glimmered in the sunlight like slivers of emeralds as she beat her boots against the ground. Behind her, Epona snuffled like what her master was smelling, she could sniff out, too.

Romani smelled, decidedly, like grass and cows and sweat and dirt and hay. Romani smelled like, well, like a little girl living on a ranch, because that is what she was. The bowstring of her lacquered yew bow was doing its damnedest, but her hands weren't yet covered in calluses like her sister's, nor did her hair smell sweet like Cremia's, nor her skin. Cremia smelled like…

Well.

"We should make lunch for your sister," he said to Romani, between snorts. "She's been working hard, and it's already past lunch time. We can eat ours, and if she's not back when we're finished, hers will be waiting for her when she finally comes in."

"Ooh! Food! Yes," said Tatl, abandoning her earlier animosity without a moment's hesitation. She breezed towards the door. "I'm particular to the strawberry preserves you make here. Ooh! D'you have any of that brown sugar butter? The inn had some in the kitchen that came from this ranch. It was about the only good thing they had to eat!"

Romani sat up and traded the smile on her face for a more conspiratorial one. "Who said Grasshopper and Firefly were invited to eat Romani and Big Sis' food?"

Tatl turned around and stared at her companion, who was bug-eyed and baffled beneath his mask. In first and second days past, Cremia always invited the two of them to eat lunch with them. He'd forgotten that he had not yet been invited. He didn't know them yet. He had forgotten.

They had forgotten, as surely as if they'd never known him. They had forgotten him.

Romani snickered. "Just kidding!" she said, and hopped to her feet. "But you have to wear that mask the whole time!"

"E-even to, to eat?!"

Romani skipped to the doorway, laughing.

The Romani Ranch household was warm, inviting, and always ready for company. A shelf of labeled products for sale and consumption greeted them upon entry from across the dirt entryway. Romani took off her shoes and set them next to the other muddy work boots, empty milk bottles, and work tools leaning against the stuccoed walls before stepping onto the well-worn wooden floor and bustling by the prominent stone fireplace. She passed a twin set of stoves and a mounted rack of well-loved iron skillets, and then a huge crate of root vegetables before stopping in front of the cupboard and rifling through it for a loaf of bread, wheel of cheese, and a few other odds and ends. Tatl hurried over and excitedly picked out ingredients with a commanding finger. Romani enthusiastically nodded her head and brought out whatever else it is she wanted, too.

"Big sis likes sandwiches with kick," said Romani. She laid the bread on the counter and sliced it in half, and then into sections. "Romani doesn't like pepper and peppers on ham sandwiches, but then again, Romani can make whatever Romani wants! Romani is the heiress of the Romani Ranch!"

Tatl ripped off a chunk of cheese from the wheel, stuffed her face with it, and then pumped her fist into the air. "Yeah! Stick it to 'em! Anarchy! Anarchy!"

She grabbed another piece of cheese, but Romani plucked it away.

"It's not ready yet!" She scolded.

Tatl wilted, and then sulked.

He left them to it and took a look around. The wooden table in the center of the room held flowers in its pink border and flowers in the twin vases on the table. One held lilies, it smelled like, and the other, roses. He suspected that one sister chose one and the second chose the other. He peered around the room in search of things in sets of two.

Two mugs, two plates, two chairs, two columns on the schedule on the wall. One was always big, and the other always small. The Mask of Scents sucked in another snoutful of air. It smelled of hay and grass and earth and charred wood and cows, and underneath that, it smelled of lavender, and sweet.

It smelled like Cremia, and the hug she'd given him on a different tomorrow night. He felt his face grow hot behind his mask. Suddenly, he was grateful that Romani had told him to keep wearing it.

Romani turned around. "Well? Grasshopper? Aren't you going to help?!"

He started. "Wh-huh? What?"

"Help? Are you going to?" Romani brandished the breadknife. Its serrated edge gave off a compelling glint.

He hustled to her side, snorting with every step.

When they finished the assembly of a heaping plate of sandwiches (pepper, peppers, ham, cheese, and mustard for Cremia; ham, cheese, salami, roast beef, mayonnaise, extra cheese, and mustard for Romani and Tatl; butter, jelly, preserves, and brown sugar, also for Romani and Tatl; and then just plain ham for the peanut gallery because he didn't know any better, paired with a dozen cookies for all of them), Romani plopped them down on the kitchen table and outlined her master plan to defend her barn.

"Now," she said. "Romani will position herself here, in front of the barn."

He frowned. If they didn't hurry, Cremia would be back before they finished. "Shouldn't we eat first?"

"In a minute!" Romani moved one sandwich in front of the loaded plate. Jelly oozed from its sides and glistened in the light of the crackling fireplace.

A drooling Tatl reached for it.

Romani rounded on her. "No! That's part of Romani's diagram! Take a different one!"

Tatl settled for a regular ham and roast beef and mayonnaise and salami and mustard and cheese and cheese.

"Anyway, as Romani was saying." She picked up five cookies and scattered them around the tablecloth. "The enemy will surround the barn and creep in close. Romani will shoot them before they get in! But Romani will need to be fast, and find the best place to station herself."

Afternoon of the First Day. Sixty-four hours remained. At fifty-two hours, a mysterious light would appear and then scatter over the grounds of Romani Ranch. Sometime between then and dawn, the light would coalesce over the ranch's main barn and take away the livestock.

Apparently. He had never been around to watch it play out that way, but according to Romani, this happened as reliably as the passing of seasons. Beings would come to her ranch, and then, provided he didn't interfere, take their cows.

That's how it would happen. This cycle, he wouldn't interfere- not directly, anyway. He would stay here, away from Anju, but close enough to search in and around Clock Town for hints about Sakon. Besides, Romani was a child, and both he and Tatl always felt more comfortable with more children around than adults. He would retrace his steps with a new, more informed perspective.

Romani pursed her lips and furrowed her brows. Despite all her bravado, she was a terrible shot, had woefully poor tools at her disposal, and knew it. He knew she knew it; the Mask of Scents picked up the scent of stressful sweat beading on Romani's body the longer she stood there contemplating. He considered scrapping his plan to seek out Sakon in Northern Clock Town tonight to help her again.

Instead, he said, "if you could get on the roof, that would be the best place to shoot them from."

Romani's head snapped up. "The roof! Of course!" She grinned. "Of course!"

She jumped up into the seat of her chair, and then onto the tabletop with a thud. The plates clattered, and her two guests scrambled to keep the twin flower vases steady.

"The roof! If I stay on the roof, I can see them all at once! It's perfect! Perfect!" She pantomimed taking aim and shooting an arrow. "They'll never take the Romani cows, so long as I, Romani, heiress of Romani Ranch, am —!"

"Romani! What are you doing on the table?!"

The three of them froze and turned around, silent, until the Mask of Scents let out a great snort.

Cremia stood in the doorway of the ranch house, watching. It was ten minutes after 2:00 pm. She was the only person around- other than Romani, who was preoccupied- to watch, water, feed, and milk the cows, so her mornings ran late and her evenings ran later. She stepped in to make lunch when her schedule allowed for it rather than when the day's schedule told her to. The Postman would be frothing at the mere thought of it.

At thirty-six hours remaining, provided the road was clear, Cremia would make the trip to the bar, Latte, in Clock Town for her final delivery. Provided he _did_ interfere and help her, she would arrive nine minutes after 10:00 pm, and leave at 11:12 pm. Otherwise, she would be forced to turn back in a shower of broken glass and graphic sprays of milk.

Romani clamped her mouth shut and quickly retook her seat in the proper way.

"We, uh, made lunch?" said Tatl, caught between the food and hiding in her companion's hat. Ultimately, she chose the food. She crammed a bite of sandwich into her mouth.

Cremia surveyed the scene: the children, the fairy, the disarrayed cupboard, the messy kitchen, the mountain of sandwiches. For a minute, she looked like she wanted to be upset, but then, she smiled instead and strode to the table.

"I can see that," she said. "Is there something in there for me?"

The Mask of Scents snuffled softly as she sidled up next to him, and took in the entire record of where she'd been that day and who she was.

Cremia smelled like the ranch, and like lavender, but also like warmth and comfort and something indescribable. She was the kind of person someone would want holding them.

He didn't know how to feel about that.

He turned his head to the side, towards Tatl instead of Cremia, and tried to hide his face even though it was covered. He felt embarrassed, and he didn't know why.

Romani beamed and pulled one of the pepper-and-peppers ham sandwiches from the pile. Her sister accepted, and took a bite.

"Mm!" She said. "Just how I like them!" She swallowed. "May I pull up a chair and eat with you?"

He was in the chair Cremia normally used, he realized. He stood up. He stood up so fast that he almost knocked it over and sent himself toppling to the ground.

Tatl looked between the two of them and muttered, "Are you serious?" around her mouthful.

"Take mine," he said. "I'm not, I'm not that hungry anyway."

Cremia put her hands on her hips. "Nonsense! You're our guest!" She walked to the cupboard and pulled a stool out from beside it. "I'm fine with just this!" She set it down by the table and sat upon it.

Romani conspiratorially made a zipping motion across her mouth and pointed at her sister with darting pupils.

Tatl shot back a thumbs-up.

Cremia took another bite of her sandwich, and swallowed. "It's nice to have company sometimes, you know?" Her breath was pungently spicy. "Romani, aren't you going to introduce me to your new friends?"

Romani grinned. "Oh! Yes, sister! This is Grasshopper and Firefly."

"Hello," said Cremia. "I'm Cremia. I didn't realize there were forest fairies this far out in Termina."

"Actually, you can call me Tatl," said Tatl. She looked at Romani. "That goes for both of you. And, uh, maybe don't mention that you've seen me to any other adults." She pointed at both sisters. "That also goes for both of you."

Romani deflated and pursed her lips, but her sister only raised an eyebrow and chuckled.

"It's nice to meet you, Tatl," said Cremia. "And Grasshopper, do you have a name you'd prefer over my sister's nickname?"

"He wears green and patters in the grass when he walks!" insisted Romani. "It's thematically fitting, and also a lot easier to remember than his real name!"

In Hyrule, on the ranch Epona was born, a little girl named Malon lived with her father, a farmhand, and their horses. As a child, she resembled Romani. As an adult seven years older, she resembled Cremia. Seeing the two sisters side-by-side was very strange; he could pick out their differences from one another and from Malon in hair color, skin tone, and mannerisms, but the two of them still made it appear as if he was looking at the same person at two different points in their life. However, there was an unmistakable difference between the ranch sisters and Malon.

Cremia mm-hmmed and nodded. "You're in a white dress, but you always have grass stains all over you. Should I call you Dirty Laundry?"

"Only if Romani can call you the Pot, because I'm Kettle, and you're covered in grass stains, too!"

Both Romani and Cremia were infinitely cleverer than sweet, simple Malon. The best Malon had managed for a nickname was the heavy-handedly uncreative, obliviously cruel "Fairy Boy", and only because Navi was around. Without her, he was nameless in Malon's eyes.

"Grasshopper is, uh, it's fine," he said, and then snorted. He plugged the Mask of Scents's nostrils with his fingers to make it stop.

Tatl snorted instead, but in laughter.

"Grasshopper is fine," he repeated.

"See?" said Romani.

Cremia smiled and leaned towards him. He could smell the pepper on her breath, the lavender on her skin, in her hair. He felt his insides start to squirm.

"Well, Grasshopper, that's a very interesting mask," she said. "Won't you take it off so you can eat your lunch, too?"

He swallowed. His face was red, and his expression was probably the same one he wore a year ago but also seven, when he was a fairyless boy in a meadow of bullies. If he took it off, he wouldn't smell anything anymore, but then he'd have to show his face.

The mask snorted through its plugged nostrils, and he choked when fingers entered his airway instead of air. He pulled off the mask in a compulsive coughing fit and slapped his palm on the table.

Romani gaped. "Grasshopper, don't die!"

Cremia jumped up and rubbed his back. Her hands electrified him where they landed, and he pulled away with a horrified grimace.

Tatl noticed, and looked from him to Cremia with a slow, diagnostic frown.

"Are you alright?" Cremia asked.

"Yes," he said. "I'm fine."

The Mask of Scents' black eyes stared up at them from the floor in a puddle of pink pigskin. The two tusks pointed skywards like the twin ridges of pinnacle rock from the waters of the western ocean. It looked like Ganon's face, if Ganon was a fleshy, mortal pig and not a yellow-eyed beast twisted and suffocated ash black from magic. He picked it up and brushed it off, and warred with himself over whether or not to put it back on.

Cremia drew her hand away. She smiled. "Oh! What a cute friend you've made, Romani!"

"I know! He's a showoff, too!" said Romani.

" _What?!_ " he said, and almost threw himself into another coughing episode.

"Yes! He shot down all of Romani's balloons to try and impress Romani!"

He looked from sister to sister, open-mouthed, and then downed his water to clear the last of his coughing from his throat. The bottom of his glass met the table with a dignified thud.

Cremia raised an eyebrow and took her seat at her stool. "Is that true?"

The role of the hero- the hero of legend, the figure in the princess' visions, the champion with the Triforce of Courage on his hand and in his heart- wielded a sword imbued with divine light and regaled with generations of legends. The sword was the hero's inheritance and right. However, he was not a hero here or anywhere, not really, and swordsmanship had never been his talent. He was a forest-dweller. He was a thief, a sneak, an adventurer, a spy, a trap-setter, and a marksman, not a knight, and definitely not a swordsman. With a sword, he was ungraceful but practical; with a slingshot, or a sling, or a bow, he was untouchable.

"I popped them, but I wasn't showing off. She told me to!"

"Not all of them," sang Romani.

"Ooooh," said Tatl.

Cremia chuckled and looked to her food. "I'll make you new balloons, Romani," she said.

"So Grasshopper can show off again?"

"I wasn't showing off!"

"You were showing off," said Tatl.

He pulled his mouth into a tight line, and then shoved the Mask of Scents back over his head with a decisive snort.

Immediately, the house and its contents assaulted his nose- the fire, the food, the flowers, the cows, the grass, the sweat, the lavender. Cremia was unignorably close, and the mask's power brought her even closer.

Cremia covered her grin with her napkin. "I see why you have that mask. Where did you find it? I've never seen one like it in town before."

"Grasshopper has a lot of masks," said Romani.

He didn't answer. He was too caught up in Cremia's scent, and remembering the texture of her blouse against his face, and the warmth of her body. Her breath smelled like pepper spice when she spoke.

"Grasshopper? The mask? Where is it from?"

Tatl finished a mouthful. "Swamp. Deku Scrubs usually have 'em, especially now that the swamp water's probably poisoned all their living pigs."

"Scrubs have pigs?" asked Romani. She focused on what was in front of her- the cows, the balloons, the pigs. The plates dully clattered against the tablecloth as she reached for another sandwich.

"The swamp is poisoned?" asked Cremia. Her mind was on a totally different level- the business, the blocked road, the poison, Anju, Kafei.

The two sisters looked at one another, and then at Tatl.

"Yes," she said, and continued her meal.

Cremia took a moment to process, and then cleared her throat. "I see. Does that mean you're from the swamp, Grasshopper? If you're here, that means the roads are clear, I suppose."

He looked up. "Oh? No, no, I'm not from the swamp." He bowed his head and stared at his hands.

"Oh! Did your parents move there recently?"

Tatl's roving eyes felt like hot coals, even through the mask.

"N-no." He sank in his chair, and braced himself for the oncoming frigid, awkward silence. "I don't, uh, I don't have any parents."

Cremia frowned, placidly, and with tight-lipped melancholy. She leaned closer to him, and he thought he might sink into the floor.

Meanwhile, Romani nodded amicably and claimed a new sandwich. "Neither do we!"

"Don't be insensitive," scolded Cremia.

"Romani isn't being insensitive! We don't! Romani barely even remembers them! It's just been Big Sis and Romani, you know? Maybe it's like that for Grasshopper and Firef-"

Tatl chimed menacingly.

"-Tatl," Romani finished.

"But you don't know that," argued Cremia. "Just because it doesn't hurt you doesn't mean it doesn't hurt other people.

His father was a tree with years beyond number. His mother was a place, a fairy, a girl, ephemeral. He had no depth of experience to explain himself or his feelings with. With one exception, nobody in his living memory had ever made him meals or washed his clothes, nobody since Navi scolded him or taught him, and, with one exception, nobody else had ever wrapped him up in their arms to tell him everything was going to be okay. Not like that.

Nobody except Cremia.

"Well? Is it like that? Grasshopper?"

" _Romani!_ "

Tatl cleared her throat. "He got the mask by winning a race against the Deku kingdom's butler," she said.

Cremia followed her lead like a soldier follows a commander. "Oh! Wow! Did you meet the King?"

"Yes," said Tatl. "He was huge. All you people are huge, but the Deku King was very huge, even from your point of view. And he was loud. And kinda mean."

The Deku King and his court had taken in the swamp's poison water long enough for it to inject veins of dangerous red through their leaves and cloud their minds with superstition and hatred. It was hardly fair to judge them for their actions and attitudes beneath its influence, and in that climate: the King's daughter was missing, the swamp was warping and dying, and the Deku butler's had no answer as to why someone else was wearing his son's face.

"The Deku King was very big, yes."

Romani leaned forward. Her mouth was full of cookies. "What about the princess? Did you meet her?"

"Oh, yes. I met her." He bit his lip. "She's very, ah," he remembered the white-hot gleam of fury alight in her eyes upon her return to her father, " very expressive."

"Is it true they have monkeys as tall as Romani? And flowers as big as this house? And witches?! And giant turtles?! And a magic lake at the top of a mountain?!"

"Well, I," he paused. "Yes, actually." He nodded. "There's ruins in the Woodfall lake, too."

"I've heard the Scrubs say that's where all the water in Termina originated," said Cremia. "I don't think that's true, though."

He and Tatl looked at one another.

"It might be one of them," they both said. "Like the spring in Ikana Hill."

Cremia tilted her head. "Ikana Hill? You've been there?"

"Yup," said Tatl. "And we'll be back soon since we can't fart around forever," she mentioned, pointedly. "Hooray. So thrilled."

He snorted at her.

"Nevermind that! Do they really have magic beans that make flying plants? In the swamp?!" asked Romani.

He tilted his head. "How do you know about those?"

Cremia finished her sandwich and took a cookie. "Romani's very popular with the restaurant owners and patrons with the establishments we supply. We both talk with them a lot."

Romani dropped her sandwich and balanced over her forearms. "What else? What else do they have?!"

Cremia's hair brushed by her shoulder as she moved it out of the way. More of her scent wafted from it, and he felt himself go dizzy.

"Grasshopper? Grasshopper!"

He shook it away. "Uh?"

"Romani, hush," her sister said. "So where are you from, anyway, if not the swamp?"

He swallowed. The Mask's power was suffocating, but without it, they would be able to see him sweat.

Tatl stepped in. "Lots of places. We travel." She picked at her bread. "A lot."

"Like where?" asked Romani.

"Like everywhere," said Tatl. She tented her fingers. "What kind of place do you want to hear about?"

* * *

 **Author's Note:** Thank you so much for reading and reviewing! I really appreciate it, as always, as few as you are!

Please be aware that I'm probably going to move the Deku Mask chapter to somewhere in this next section of the story. After going over my notes, I feel it fits better there. For now, it is where it is, but just be aware that if one day you check this story and everything seems out of order, I've done this intentionally. Not to fear.

Thank you all, again!


	22. All Night Mask

Anju's forgetfulness was a universal constant. Together, he and Tatl crept through the second floor's carelessly unlocked veranda door, snuck past the staff room, and hurried down the stairs.

For a minute, he thought he heard Anju say something through her door, but closed it out of his mind. Another day. He would venture through there another day.

The Stock Pot Inn's painted wood floors and walls were lovingly worn, as they had been every today past, and as they always were. The main lights in the hallway extinguished an hour prior, so only the red candles tucked in a few lonely sconces beat back the night. In two days, the darkness would take over, but for now, only shadows crept out from the corners and split the inn up into separate, dynamic colonies of dark and light.

Granny's doorway indiscriminately spilled firelight from its base, and when he opened the door, it swaddled him in warmth. Tatl dove into his hat. Granny herself was in her wheelchair, like always, and with a book in her hands, like always. She looked up.

"Tortus?" she asked, squinting.

Of every role he played in Termina, Tortus was the easiest. Granny never asked for details, never minded where he might be going, and never asked uncomfortable questions. He had no disguise to wear and no lies to tell. To Granny, he was, and so, therefore, he was _Tortus_. Any and all three days, he was unconditionally Tortus.

He held out a bottle and bag. The image of the Romani Ranch cow branded on the front of both ogled the room. "I brought you some cookies."

Granny's black eyes glittered beneath her heavy, swollen lids. "Thank the gods," she said, and all but snatched the milk and cookies from his hands. She inhaled the latter in three bites, and washed it down with the former in a series of mighty gulps.

From within his hat, Tatl whistled approvingly.

Granny sucked in a mouthful of air, and then slammed her fists on the lace doilies draped over the arms of her wheelchair. She coughed. Crumbs rained down her shawl and to her lap.

"Careful, Granny," he said, and patted her back.

Granny inhaled and exhaled a few more times, and then waved him away. "Don't scold me- I haven't had anything worth eating presented to me in a whole month! I'm starving!"

"Cremia sends her regards," he said.

Granny craned her head around until her hooked nose almost touched her guest's. "Cremia made these?"

"She asked me to give them to you."

Granny turned her head to the wall by her bed, and the pictures on it. Anju, her mother, Tortus, Gampy, and Granny deadpanned at them in various combinations from a mishmash of frames. A younger Cremia appeared, too, in a single picture alongside Anju and a third figure with a blacked-out face.

"Cremia can cook. Her parents raised her right." Granny's eyes misted over. "That'll be the one good thing about leaving the inn for the last time, I suppose."

She grew quiet. The crackling fire churned out a warm, unifying glow over the bold yellow plaid of her shawl and her straw-thin grey hair, and sent her shadow long and looming across the patterned carpet. His joined hers as a second tower of black across the ground.

Then, the floor above creaked, and a trail of dust trickled from the ceiling. It shone like gold in the light. Voices floated down from the floor above them- one halting and unsure, and the other measured and decisive.

"If Kafei really has run off with Cremia, then…"

He and Tatl had heard this conversation before. He had thought, if he stayed away from the door, he could shut it out. If he stayed away from the walls, he could cover it over like wallpaper over rotting wood. He was a fool.

The voices faded to surreptitious whispers.

"Cremia," Granny said. "After all the slander I've heard against that poor girl, we're still begging off her for help, at the end. It's incredible how desperate we've been since you left, Tortus."

Granny shook her head, and stared into her shadow.

Then, she sighed. "Cremia. She always fancied Kafei, too. The three of them were always together." She snorted. "It's a shame he didn't choose her instead, from the very beginning. I wish he had."

The ceiling spoke, again. " _How happy could you possibly_ be _, marrying a man who runs off when he's about to be married?!"_

The words washed over the three down below, and sent their shadows trembling in the firelight.

The floor above creaked again, more gently. The next words were muffled, like the entire inn was underwater.

" _It would make your life… just like your mother's._ "

Granny bowed her head. The fire's glow flickered and spat over a spot of moisture somewhere in the wood. The picture of Tortus on the wall stared placidly into the room from a snapshot of time long, long before these three days.

Tatl prodded his ear. "Let's go. I don't think-"

Granny spoke. "Oh, Tortus. They think I can't hear them arguing upstairs, and they think I forget, but they're wrong. It's all excuses." Her voice was quiet, but clear. "All of them are excuses for different things. No matter how well I shut myself in, no matter how cunningly feeble my memory is, the truth still creeps in through the seams and finds me."

Whatever Anju said next was too quiet to hear, but her mother: " _Come back to_ what? _Won't this town be crushed?!"_

Granny pursed her lips. The book in her lap displayed a map of Termina from long ago, when the rivers cut through the center of the land, and Clock Town was nothing but a lake.

"We think we can keep our problems out with Clock Town's walls and say we've nothing to do with their business, and they have none to do with ours, but that's nonsense. We can't keep Termina out with our walls. We can't shut out the moon with stones and guards. Whatever we are most afraid of, it will come. It will come." She slid a crochet bookmark in the pages of her book, and closed the cover. "My daughter-in-law and I agree on that, at least."

He bit his lip. "Kafei, he," he swallowed. There was a lump in his throat he hadn't noticed before. "Kafei never went to Cremia. Never. She doesn't know anything about this."

"We don't have to stay here," Tatl whispered. "Remember- we need to be in the northern park by midnight. We can leave at any time."

"You should know," he said, to Granny. " _Someone_ should know, even if it's something nobody will remember."

"Oh, I know." Granny stroked the cover of the book in her lap like it was an animal's fur. "Kafei is the only one of us with any sense, probably. He's smarter than his father, and with more spine. He started running the moment he read the writing on the wall, and of us, he is the only one who might make it far enough to survive."

Tatl popped out of her hiding spot. "Granny, you think too highly of him."

"My, what a pretty fairy," mused Granny. "Pretty light."

"Thanks," said Tatl, like she didn't mean it. "Kafei's a fool and an idiot, and stubborn, too."

Granny chuckled. "Maybe, maybe. But I know he never ran off with Cremia, like she thinks. I know that. That's where my daughter-in-law and I disagree." Her eyes grew misty and her lower lip trembled. "He isn't like Tortus." She smiled at him, wistful. "He isn't like my son."

He bit the inside of his cheek and clenched his fists. The carpet underfoot was suddenly fascinating. "I," he said, " You should know. I am not," he put a hand over his eye, "I am not-!

Granny's wiry, spotted hands pushed the wooden wheels of her chair to the bookshelf. "Would you like to hear a story before you go, Tortus? I'm sure I can find a short one."

He was so many things, and yet, he was also not so many things. Termina gave him so many things to be, he could hardly keep track of them all. He was Mikau, he was Darmani, he was Keeta, he was Master, he was Grasshopper, he was Tortus, he was green hat, green clothes. He had a million names, and none of them were his. He did not fear the darkness, and he did not fear death, but the thought of revealing himself made his head dizzy and his knees weak.

"Granny, I am not Tortus!" he shouted.

Tatl turned to her companion, speechless.

Granny's narrow eyes widened, and for the first time, she really looked at him. Reflected in her eyes were two figures: a fairy made of white light, and a small, stocky body with red-gold hair, covered in green. Their eyes were wide and alight with desperation.

Granny's globular, black eyes glistened in the light, totally exposed.

He looked to his shoes. "I'm, I'm sorry."

"I know," she whispered.

"I'm so sorry."

"I know, I know."

"Granny, I'm so sorry. I just-!"

"You don't need to cry. I know. I've known since the beginning, Tortus."

His head shot up again to face her, and he found Granny peering resolutely at himself and Tatl from beneath her thick eyelids. Her face was dry.

Granny put a hand on his shoulder. "You should run, while you still can. You should run far, and run fast."

"I, I can't," he said. "Not yet. There's something that I," he grimaced at how much he sounded like Kafei, "there's something I have to do first. I have-!" he held his hands out into the air to grab something he didn't know the shape of. "I have time."

"Time, eh?" Granny sneered. "How reckless. I've told you stories about that. Nobody has as much time as they think they do. The only ones with enough time are Majora, the Giants, and the Goddess of the stuff." She turned back to her bookshelf.

"You'll have to listen better, Tortus. I'll read it to you again tomorrow."

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

Northern Clock Town was placid. Jim's balloon bobbed in the branches of the playground's tree, and the guard by the gate slept fitfully on his feet. Above them, the moon watched, hungry.

The old woman from the bomb shop, hunched beneath her sack, ambled through the gate and down the main path.

Sakon appeared from the playground. His white shirt looked blue from the night air, and his bald, grinning head gleamed in the moonlight.

From the shadow of the entrance to the Great Fairy's spring, he drew his bow.

Sakon snatched the bag and tossed the old woman to the ground. When he was halfway to the open northern gate, an arrow whizzed through the air and struck the bag.

It exploded.

The guard awoke with a horrified scream while Tatl shot across the park with a furious gleam.

Her voice was faint over the ringing in his ears from the explosion. "I thought you were going to shoot it out of his hands! How could you miss?! You _never_ miss!"

The sudden flash of light left spots on his vision, but as they cleared, he stumbled after Tatl and swallowed the carnage with wide eyes. There was no bag, and Sakon was scattered in charred, flaming bits around the park.

He hadn't missed. The sack contained an empty bag and casing, didn't it? He had no idea that it was full of explosives, too!

Why had the old woman loaded herself down with that much gunpowder?!

The old woman hurried to his side and latched onto his arm. "What have you _done?!_ Didn't you know what was in there?! How could you be so careless with something so dangerous?!"

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

 **Author's Note: Thank you to all of you who read and review! I know I do not mention the relevant mask directly, so hopefully this chapter is not too, uh, meta.**


	23. Bunny Hood

Romani Ranch slept tucked inside its fences and beneath a periwinkle-black sky. Dawn approached from just beyond the eastern hills, and the windows of the ranch house were dark and tranquil. Everything was untouched and unchanged, just as he'd left it, except for the barn, where the roof had gone missing and the door stood open.

Tatl looked around. "Seems like it's already over. It's too bad about the cows, though." She pursed her lips. "Are you sure you still want to stay here? I know that we, well, we, well. Well." She sank in the air, and then landed on his shoulder.

He'd killed a man tonight. This was not the first time Sakon had died, but it was the first time he had actually been the one to kill him.

Although Sakon was not the first person he'd killed, either.

"...Nevermind," said Tatl.

The morning air wasn't cold, exactly, since summer's approaching shadow fell over the ranch on these three days, but it still raised bumps over his arms and spread his hair across his face. He pushed it back into his hat and followed the path up the hill, towards the house and barn.

"Romani is probably upset," warned Tatl. "You saw how she looked on the third day, when we first met her. She could barely look anyone in the eyes. Are you sure you want to see her?"

"We should at least check in on her," he said. "Perhaps explain the situation to her sister."

He approached the barn and peeked into the open door.

Inside, the stalls overflowed with hay, and the troughs with water. A pitchfork and shovel leaned against the wall like unconcerned loiterers in a market while the pail sat alone in the middle of the dirt floor. Cremia's stool, the one she used every morning for milking her animals, hid behind it. The only cows left on Romani Ranch were images on the the jars and canisters in the corner. Above them, where a thick roof of straw and mud fought off the elements not four hours ago, the morning sky punched through in a dedicated spray of speckled light. In the center of it stood a barefoot Cremia.

Tatl fluttered to her. "Oh. Cremia. Romani must've..."

She faltered.

"They're gone," Cremia muttered. "I should have listened. I…"

"I know this is hard for you," said Tatl. "But you can't blame yourself for this."

"But she told me. My little sister, she told me what would happen."

Tatl floated closer. "You'll get through this. Romani, she'll, she'll forgive you. You'll know for, for," she winced, "next time."

He frowned at her. She pressed her hand above her eyes and mouthed back at him, " _What was I supposed to say?"_

"Let us know if we can do anything for you or Romani," he said. "I'm sure she doesn't want to talk to anyone right now."

Cremia stared at the wall for a little longer. Eleven seconds.

"Romani…"

Then, she turned around. In her hands was Romani's yew bow.

"My sister. And the cows. They're gone. She's gone. My little sister..."

Tatl turned back to her companion, eyes huge.

Cremia's fingers slipped on the bow, and her eyes pierced through him. "Romani is _gone!_ "

That couldn't be right. His heartbeat muffled his hearing and blurred his vision like he'd shot off an arrow in the wrong place and caused another explosion. He first saw Romani on this ranch on the third day, without any of his interference. She sat on the crate in front of the barn with her head in her hands, and watched with dull eyes as he tore across the field to Epona and stuck his fingers through the cracks in her pen just to touch her and know she was real. Both of them stayed on Romani Ranch on the third day. He found both of them on Romani Ranch on the third day.

Both of them.

"Where's Epona?" he demanded.

"Your horse?! Again?!" Tatl chimed at him. "How can you ask that when Cremia's-!"

He bolted for the barn door and flung it open. "Wherever Epona is, Romani might be! This is only the second day; we met them on the third. It's only the second day- they should still be here tomorrow!"

He slipped the bunny hood over his head and ran outside.

The lush grass on the rolling hills fanned out in waves beneath the gentle breeze, and the sun's early light glazed the dew on the strands with the light of the dawn. The barn and the house sat innocuously at the valley's edge, and watched as Grasshopper darted through the field, over the bordering ridges, and into the thin woods behind them. They watched, and the moon watched.

He climbed the ladder by the chimney to the top of the ranch house's roof and cupped his hands over his mouth.

"Romani! Epona!" His voice echoed over the grass, and through the field.

" _Epona!"_

Somewhere, a rooster crowed back at him, and at the sun. Beyond that, the ranch was quiet. He fumbled for the ocarina and held it up to his lips.

When Epona was little, littler than she was now, with nobbier knees and a mane more like dandelion fluff than hair, Malon repeated a lullaby to her over and over to keep her from running. Epona was a cowardly horse, even as a baby, and she had no mother mare. Instead, she had Malon, and she only trusted the people Malon trusted.

Of course, Malon trusted everyone, so when Epona grew up and a cruel new master pushed her onto the path of a war horse, she didn't trust anyone who couldn't sing her song.

He pushed the notes from the holes, and spread them far and wide across the land. He counted to ten, and then to twenty, and then to thirty, and then forty.

Nothing.

Perhaps Epona was gone, again, swept up by another malevolent force beyond understanding, or perhaps she'd finally gotten wise to the fact that he was as worthy to own a horse as she was to stare down creatures of bloodlust and hatred, and lead her side victoriously through the dark carnage and to the light. Perhaps she'd run away forever, back to the place she was born, back to Malon. Epona still had a place to belong. She had people who knew her and loved her by name, and that she loved. He took her far, far away from all of that just to keep him company.

How could he? Who was he but a stranger seven years too early and three days too late to be anything to anyone, anyway?

Tatl scaled the house and glittered by his side. She scanned the horizon with pursed lips. She saw grass, hills, fences, trees. The clouds above rumpled the texture of the sky into the billowing clumps of hair studded throughout a sheep's wool. In town, this morning heralded rain, but here, they sky above held.

The sunrise erupted in a deep, unstoppable orange.

After a while, Tatl said, "I'm sorry."

He blinked, stupidly, at the blistering sun, at the glaring moon, at the barely-there outline of the Stone Tower and Woodfall hovering in the distance.

"We can always turn it back. We can do it all again, and help Romani, again, and then we can go to the canyon and finish our business." Tatl nodded, mostly to herself. "Then we can go to the end of the three days with all of the Giants, and then…"

"And then…" Tatl grew quiet.

She was considering a lake pressed against a dam, a river at the edge of a cliff, the unknown beyond the borders of a map. What happens when the floodgates open? What happens when the river runs out of track? What happens after the first step into the darkness? What happens on the fourth day?

What happens after time's end?

"I don't know," she said.

Then, a whinny rang over the fields, and a red filly with a white mane streaked through the ranch gates.

He scrambled down the ladder so quickly that, at about halfway down, he jumped from it entirely and let his knees take the punishment. Epona tore down the ranch path, and he shredded the grass beneath his boots. They met one another halfway when she skidded to a stop and circled around him, muzzle in his hair, on his shoulders, tongue in his ear. He steadied her face against his forehead and scratched her ears.

"Please forgive me."

Epona grunted and nosed against his cheek.

He squeezed his eyes shut and pushed back.

"Forgive me."

A gentle chime pulled them apart.

Cremia was at Tatl's side, flush-faced from following. Her red hair fell in loose, mussed locks above her white nightgown, and her lips held a tight line above her exposed neck. Whenever she had discovered her sister's absence, it was early.

"Romani wasn't with her," Tatl said. "I'm sorry."

"How?" he asked.

"I don't know," said Tatl. "But she's gone. She's gone, Cremia."

At first, Cremia didn't move at all. She remained perfectly still under the morning sky, perfectly still beneath the unflinching stare of the moon. Then, slowly, her lips trembled, her knees gave out, and she shattered like glass against the ground.

"Romani…!" Tears streamed down her face in ruthless tracks. "Why? _Why?!_ Why would you take my _sister?!_ Were the cows not enough?! Was my father not enough?! My friends in town, were they not enough?! Why?! Why Romani?!" She gripped at her face, and then the ground. " _Romani!"_

The bunny hood brought him to her side almost instantly. "Cremia, Cremia, it's going to be okay. She'll come back. She's going to come back tomorrow. There's, there's, I think-"

"My sister! Why?! Why my sister?! Why did you take my little sister?!" Cremia's hands buried themselves in the green of the grass, and then abandoned it for the green of his tunic. Her panic-blasted eyes looked through him, not at him, as she gripped him for all he was worth.

"Give her back! Give her back to me! My little sister! She's all I have- all I have left! Romani is all I have left!"

She shook. Her breaths gasped from her body in short, truncated bursts, and the cords in her neck strained beneath her skin. The red in Cremia's face infected her body, and bled out in splotches over her chest, around her throat, in her wide, wet eyes. She grit her teeth and slammed her fists against his chest once, again, again.

"My sister! Give me back my sister! What am I supposed to do without her?! What's the _point?_ _What's the point?!_ "

"My sister," whimpered Cremia. "Romani! _Romani! My sister!"_

Her breaths sped up, and then finally broke into a slow wheeze.

Her nails dug into his chest, and he found himself holding her, and he found himself trembling. They were both trembling. The smell of lavender found his nose.

She coughed, and screamed, and coughed out choked sobs again and again. The sun broke from the horizon and rose into the sky as its own suspended, burning ball.

"There's nobody left," she whispered. "Kafei, Anju, father… there's nobody left. Nobody."

Tatl chimed. "Let's get her inside," she said, and looked up at the moon. "Somewhere private."

He swallowed, nodded, and then gently guided Cremia to her feet, and then across the field to the ranch house. She leaned against him and stared, hard eyed, at the ground.

The kitchen fire had smothered in the ashes hours before, and the lanterns above held only grey shadows. It was dark. Cremia's bare feet sank into the dirt entryway, and tracked grass slick with dew across the old wooden floors of the kitchen. The flowers in the twin vases on the kitchen table watched the two of them creep past, and listened as the stairs in the back of the room creaked with each step they took, in sets of two.

He pushed open the door to Cremia and Romani's shared bedroom, and set Cremia down on her bed. Tatl opened the cover on the room's round window on the back wall, and the daytime sun pierced through in a thick, diagonal beam to the floor. She hurried for a match to light the gas lights suspended from the ceiling.

Cremia said, "Don't."

"O-oh," said Tatl. She bobbled in the low light. "Okay. Do you want us to, um, make, um, make you something to eat?"

Cremia's hands still hooked into his shirt like adamant leeches, but her flat, dry stare bored holes into the furniture on the other side of the room. She swallowed, but didn't say anything.

A thin summer quilt of white and dusty purples covered her bed from headboard to footboard. Across the room, a second, smaller bed in undisturbed white and pink stood in parallel. Above it was a shelf. Romani's stuffed horses pranced on the mantle above- one black and regally dressed in red and gold, and the other red with white socks and a white mane, just like Epona.

Cremia fixated on them.

"Hey," said Tatl, "Maybe we should go." She nudged him to the door. "Maybe we'll-"

"The second day," said Cremia. Her fingers still held his tunic fast. "What's the second day?"

He and Tatl stiffened.

"The second day." She turned her head to face him. "Tell me. What does that mean, that it's too early? You said she'd be back."

He choked on his tongue. Lies were poison to the unprepared. "I, you, you misunderstood. She'd told me, she'd said that they would come tonight, not last night. I think. Maybe I was, I was confused." His skin felt like ice. Beneath it, his muscles spasmed in nervous convulsions. Each word felt like something alien and unnatural spewing from his mouth as he said them. "I miscounted."

Cremia didn't say anything. She didn't move, except a tiny twitch in the side of her neck.

"That mask," she said. Her eyes flicked to the bunny hood. "That's Grog's mask. How did you get it?"

"He gave it to me."

"When?"

"Yesterday," he said. It was even true, in a way.

"Why?"

"I, I helped with, ah, with his chores."

"When? What chores? You've been here for a day. I don't remember you ever leaving to go play in the cucco shack. You spent all day here, with Romani."

A smile spread across his face and then disposed of itself an instant later, like his face had stretched out as wide as it could and then tore at the corners.

The spasm in her neck returned. "If I asked Grog how you got his mask, what would he tell me?"

Grog the farmhand loved his chickens more than anything. He wanted nothing more than to see them make the leap from infancy to adulthood, and he'd granted that wish with a song and the magic of Guru Guru's feathered mask. Grog had paid for the magic of one mask with another, but that had been at the beginning of a three days that was not this one. If she asked Grog for an answer, he wouldn't have one.

He pulled the bunny hood down around his neck with a trembling hand, like if he could put it out of sight, he could put it out of her mind. "I found it."

"That mask is like Romani's Mask. They're a pair. One symbolizes maturity, and the other, youth- except you don't give someone the bunny hood for being immature. It's because they have the energy of youth but the mind and means to direct it constructively. You don't earn it by doing chores for a day." Cremia fixed him with her stare. "How did you get that mask?"

"I don't understand why this is important," said Tatl.

Cremia's eyes narrowed. "You couldn't have gotten that mask anywhere else, and I've never seen you on or around my ranch before yesterday." Her white knuckles ground her nails into his tunic. "What is the second day?"

The sweat beading on his forehead spread to his palms. The ocarina was at his side, in the pouch on his belt. If he could think of an excuse to play, the Song of Time would erase this moment and give him a new set of days.

He reached for it. "The second day is, is, ah, has to do with a song," he said. One finger touched the ocarina, and then two, and the third and fourth pulled it out from the pouch. "I can play it for you, if-"

She slapped his hands from his belt. The ocarina flew from his lap and rolled across the floor.

Tatl zipped after it, and tried and failed to lift it by the mouthpiece.

"What's the second day?" Cremia demanded. A wild light illuminated her blue irises. "Why do you think Romani's coming back?" Both her hands gripped his collar. "Tell me. Where's my sister? What do you know?! Did you kidnap her?!" She shook him, and her desperate eyes pinned him to his spot. "Did you?!"

"No! No, I never-!" He fought her. "I never kidnapped her!"

Cremia was bigger than he was, and stronger. "Why should I believe you?!"

"I didn't do anything to Romani!" he cried. "I didn't know she would be taken! In the past, she-!"

"In _what_ past?!"

He broke away from her and dove for the ocarina on the floor with a thud. Cremia kicked him away and planted her foot over it, and over Tatl, who shrieked.

"I swear to the Four I'll break it!" she threatened, screaming. "Grasshopper, I'll crush it and your fairy!"

"No! Cremia, you can't!"

She spun the ocarina with her foot to bring Tatl's head just beneath her heel.

"Cremia, I-!"

"Cursed!" screamed Tatl. "He's cursed! He's bound to the three days before the Carnival and swims back and forth through every moment of time within them like a fish in a river!"

Cremia paused. The light punching through the room enveloped her from the back, so only the white outlines of daytime drawing out her body language could speak what she was thinking.

Tatl continued. "We've been here before! We've met your sister before, but you'll never remember it! We guided you to deliver milk to town! You gave us Romani's mask, the one you made for your sister! You'll never know it, because it was a tomorrow that's already happened! You told us about how worried you were for Kafei and Anju, and about how much you missed your father!"

From the floor, he propelled himself forwards and snatched Tatl from beneath Cremia's foot. The ocarina spun away from his fingers, and she swiped it from the floor.

Tatl zipped out of his hand and into his hat.

"Give me my instrument," he said, finding his feet. "Cremia, give it to me! I can fix this!"

The curved edge of the ocarina sparkled in the light, and so did Cremia's mussed hair and furious eyes.

"You're lying," she said.

"Please! Cremia, give me that ocarina!"

"You're lying, and you knew. You knew she'd be taken, and that's why you disappeared for the night."

He stretched out his hand. "Cremia!"

"You _knew._ "

His throat felt unbearably thick. "Cremia, please give me that instrument!"

"You knew! About my sister! _You knew!_ " She pulled the ocarina to her chest and backed away until the window's edges framed her head in a halo of wrathful light. "You knew, and you didn't do anything!"

He lunged for her. She pushed him back and held the ocarina above her head as he clawed at her, and at the air.

"Please! Cremia!"

"Where is my sister?! Where is she?!"

"I don't know!"

"Liar!" She pushed him down, and threw the ocarina of time to the floor. It hit the ground with a decided crack, but didn't break.

He threw himself to the floor after it cradled it with his body. Cremia followed him down and tore at his curled hands and torso with a desperate fury. Tatl flew from his hat and beat Cremia back with a series of merciless flashes. The harsh light cast Cremia's struggling silhouette against the wall in isolated photographs of black on white until she backed away and tripped onto the mattress of her bed, screeching and covering her eyes.

The two of them faced opposite walls until Tatl stopped, and the cool low light of the room settled back in. Cautiously, he peered around the room and stood up to find Cremia in a ball on her bed. The muffled plodding of his footsteps was sacrilege in the heavy silence.

His voice was even worse. "I don't know where Romani is," he said. "I know that a great ball of light appeared in the sky to take the cows, and it may have taken her, too, but I don't know anything more than that. I'm sorry."

Eventually, she sucked in a breath, and shuddered into a weeping puddle on her quilt.

"I'm sorry," he said. "I'm sorry we've troubled you. Please, please just…" he ran his hand down his face, and ducked his head. "Please excuse us."

His hand reached for the bedroom door. Cremia sat up and grabbed his wrist before he could open it.

"Stay," she said, after a dozen false starts, and rooted him to the spot. "Grasshopper, please don't leave me alone."

"Cremia, let go of him," Tatl urged. "We've done enough damage. Let us go."

It didn't matter how far he could go or how fast he could run. It didn't matter that he had all the energy of youth in his bones and the wind pushing at his heels. He could never escape her, escape this. So long as he had the ocarina, he couldn't escape anything.

"They've left. They've all left me." Cremia held the end of his arm and wept. "Please don't leave me here by myself, too."


	24. Great Fairy's Mask

Sometime, before his living memory, destiny chose him to let go of all his earthly ties and serve as its agent in a land warring between darkness and light for its soul. The eternal childhood promised to him in the forest, the one it took years for him to grow into, he outgrew in a matter of seconds when the waters of time rose above his head and the divine light in someone else's dreams baptized him as Hyrule's hero.

His was a tale of displacement and ill-fitting roles: a mortal in a forest of fey, a child in a grown man's body, a stranger in a future he had nothing to do with, a disowned orphan in a past he fought tooth and nail to soothe, a hostage in someone else's body, an impostor in a mask. He made a habit of squeezing into the uncomfortable spaces in ruined temples, unspoken conversations, and the liminal areas between _then_ and _now_ and _later_ , and never escaped them. They'd consumed him, and he had warped. He didn't belong here or there or anywhere, and so he traveled to places other people didn't to learn things he shouldn't.

Explaining this to Cremia was like pulling something out of a box that it could never fit back into. The words settled awkwardly in the room like the rough, uneven surface of the Deku mask in his hands as he put it over his face.

First to change was his eyes. They bulged out of his head to fill the amber slots on the Deku child's face. His covered lips moved to fit the ringed snout protruding where his nose and mouth used to be, and where his teeth went was a secret even to him. The bark on the mask grew and covered over his own skin, everywhere on his body, and leaves and twigs sprouted at his hairline while his body twisted and shrank to new proportions: an oversized head in an oversized hat, stumpy legs in boots that made his feet look like clown shoes, and a tiny wooden body barely keeping his tunic on his shoulders. His toes could barely reach the floor from Romani's chair as he was, but as a Deku scrub, he was utterly stranded above the floorboards.

The Deku child's voice floated through the room in a weak, warbling gasp, like his head was perpetually underwater.

"This is not who I am," he said, "and this is not magic that I wanted, but it was the magic I have been given."

Then, he took the mask off, and the transformation happened in reverse.

Cremia sat through it, in her nightgown, at her place at the downstairs kitchen table. She barely blinked. She barely breathed. Three hours ago, the morning sky opened up and cried for her and her sister. The raindrops pelted against the roof, and every few minutes the rumble of a distant, thunderous tantrum made it through the walls. Otherwise, no noise distracted from him and his strangeness. Cremia's home lacked a clock, and the absence ran a chill through his whole body and sent his hairs on end as the leaves and bark on his skin faded away and left them in its place.

The kitchen fireplace's mouth gaped, devoid of wood or flame, but the gas lights above them pulsed in soft yellows and oranges.

"You're a shapeshifting spirit," Cremia said at last, "and you're spending these three days looking for Kafei." She swallowed. "On Anju's request."

"Oh, we've found Kafei," said Tatl. "Don't worry. We came here because we know you don't have anything to do with any of that nonsense, no matter what anyone says."

He glared at Tatl. "That's also not the only reason we're here."

Tatl absorbed his stare from her place on the head of the kitchen salt shaker, and sent an unwavering one back at him. Whatever she was thinking was a mystery, but whatever it was she'd never thought to ask about him, or had the nerve to ask about him before, she knew anyway. Her wings twitched in time with the seconds passing through the uncomfortable quietude. He felt naked.

"Where is he?" asked Cremia.

"Excuse me?"

"Kafei. Where is he?"

"Clock Town," said Tatl. "Hiding in a black market shop's back room because he lost his wedding mask."

Cremia's brows furrowed. "Lost?"

He corrected Tatl. "It was stolen from him, and he couldn't get it back."

"That doesn't sound like Kafei. He's very capable. He's always been very capable, even as a child."

"Well, not capable enough, apparently."

"Tatl," he warned.

"It's true!"

"Tatl!"

Cremia looked at the fairy. "What does that mean?"

Tatl pointed to her companion. "Sorry. I might get in trouble for saying too much."

He glared at her. "It's your flippant disregard for the details that gets to me, not what you have to say."

"Right back at you," she said. "Cold bastard. I would have liked to know your fairy left because you'd grown up and participated in a strange continuation of that awful, senseless war that lost so many children to the Woods in the first place." She chimed. "I would have liked to know that."

He grit his teeth, and swallowed something sharp and sour. "I didn't choose it."

"But you went along with it."

The thunder rumbled through the stucco walls. Immediately, he could see her in front of him, racing by on a white horse- crystal blue eyes, flaxen blonde hair, pink and white skirts like the petals of a lily- asking him, imploring him, begging him for help.

"It's not a mistake I plan to make again."

Cremia interrupted them. "What happened to Kafei?" Her voice was flat and thick.

"In short," he slid his eyes from Tatl to Cremia, "He and I, well, in a way, the thing that happened to me happened to him."

Cremia blinked. "Which part?"

"He's a child," Tatl blurted. "Kafei's been turned into a child. He's trapped in a body he doesn't belong to anymore."

"Kafei." Cremia swallowed. "Madame Aroma. That woman. She sends people asking. She has for a while, for months. Before he even proposed. She never let me have any privacy, ever. She would have been a horrible mother-in-law. I'd never have any privacy again. But the ranch..."

She shook her head.

"Anju and her family, they think he's chosen me instead." Cremia rubbed her jaw. "Because of the money. They must think I seduced him because he's the mayor's son."

"No," he said, definitively. "Only Anju's mother thinks that. Aroma doesn't know what to think, and Anju and her grandmother certainly don't think this has anything to do with you."

Tatl tittered. "Besides. Anju's family is going to come running to you tomorrow night, regardless. Anju will be wishing he did go to you, if only to see him again before the end."

"Tatl!"

"I'm taking a page from your book," she countered. "It's not like Cremia will remember any of this, anyway, when you turn back the days. Right?"

Cremia looked to the flowers at the center of the table, and the blue ocarina sitting between them. A series of hairline-thin cracks spread across its center like a thunderbolt cutting through a crystalline sky.

"If you play it, and time goes back, I won't remember any of this? You, telling me any of this?"

"No," he said.

"Will it still work?" she asked.

"What?"

"The ocarina. Will it still work?"

The ocarina was a sacred treasure passed down for ages. As far as he knew, its magic was far-reaching, but unpredictable. He had no idea how it worked, or what it was about the ocarina that made it do what it did. If it was broken, even a little, would that change its effect? By how much? Was it still safe to use?

"Probably."

"Are you going to try?"

"Yes," he said. "But not right now."

"Why?"

His route through Termina was like a maze with only so much time for him to get through, and so many different ways to go through it. If he didn't take the time to observe the domino effect from what he'd already done, didn't bother to peek down every corridor he passed to make note of for next time, this would be time wasted, and this suffering not only needless, but potentially inescapable.

"The moment to turn it back has not come."

Tatl sneered, and muttered some insult about his cryptic answers under her breath.

Cremia nodded, and then nodded again.

"I see," she said. Then, "You won't learn anything else from this ranch, I don't think. My life," she paused, and then looked to the flowers again. "My life doesn't really have any meaning anymore."

"Cremia," he said, horrified, and reached a hand out across the table to take hers. It was cold, even as he squeezed it.

"My little sister was set to inherit the ranch. Romani is a boy's name." Cremia's face was that of a statue. "My parents hoped for a son after me. When Romani was born, they thought she would be the last child, so they gave everything to her. Our future lies with Romani." She smiled, almost. "My job was to keep everything secure in order to pass it on to her. Now that she's gone, what purpose do I serve? Can I get married? Kafei doesn't want me, but I can't blame him. What man would want a girl with only a failing ranch as her dowry?"

The truth was unignorable. Romani's name and presence permeated the ranch in every single way, much like Anju's had colored Cremia's relationship with Kafei. He could see it in the pictures of them on the walls, in how Kafei had never even considered asking Cremia for help. He had not mentioned her once.

"Cremia," he urged.

"The moon will fall at the dawn of the Carnival of Time. I believe you." Her face was utterly still. "Do not tell me to go on, or be strong, or anything. My fate has already been decided, one way or another. Romani's whereabouts, Kafei's affection, Anju's faith, it's all just vanity. None of it matters. It's comforting, in a way. My time and choices are, ultimately, meaningless." She laughed, and wiped at her face. "It doesn't matter how many mistakes I've made. It doesn't really matter, after all."

He stood up and slammed his hands on the table, palms flat. The Deku mask toppled from his lap and fell to the floor, and the flowers on the table trembled. Tatl startled and flew high into the air at the noise.

Cremia's huge eyes watered, but didn't blink as she absorbed his resolute anger.

"You cannot think about it that way," he said. "It doesn't work like that!" It cannot work like that, because I am here, Tatl is here, we _exist_ , and we won't let it! Do you understand?! Even if it's been poorly placed, I have been allowed power and asked to use it! I have been allowed a say in the future! If it works like that, then I-!"

He heaved. He had made the same mistake, in a way, as the one the princess had talked him into.

He was a fool.

"If it works like that, then I don't have any purpose here, or in Hyrule, or _anywhere!_ Navi never had any purpose at all! Rauru, Darunia, Darmani, Ruto, Mikau, Impa, Nabooru, Saria, their lives didn't-!"

He closed his eyes, and then his mouth. The Deku mask stared up at him from the floor.

None of his friends were coming back. Ever.

He was, in many ways, a child still chasing fairies through a dark and uncertain wood. He called each problem, each possibility, each hope to himself because he appeared as something he was not, and sometimes even began to believe it. If he had enough of them, enough of their power, something might happen, and the combined merit of his _hoping_ and _wishing_ and _praying_ and _trying_ would amount to something. A Great Fairy might appear from the fragments and grant his deepest desire, since the Triforce could not and never would.

"Excuse me," he said, breaking away from the table. "You've been through enough today." He shuddered. "I don't, I don't have any place to speak to you about how you should feel. Do with your time what you will."

He gathered mask in preparation for the long journey from Romani's chair to the door, but when he reached for his ocarina, Cremia's hands hid it.

He looked from her hand to her face, dumb, and with his brow furrowed.

"I told you I didn't want to be left alone," she said. "Don't go. Please."

He shook his head. "I can't stay any longer. I shouldn't."

"Are you going to turn back time?" Cremia asked.

He didn't make any indication one way or another. The lamps above their heads flickered in uncertainty, and the rain pelted the roof.

"Look what his presence has already done," urged Tatl. "It's best you let him go before something else happens. You don't want someone like him around. Let him go."

Cremia's lips parted in a thoughtful question, and then closed. She had added a wool shawl to her nightgown when she came downstairs, and it slipped down past her shoulders as she considered her guests.

She shook her head. "No. Stay. At least until we see if my sister..." she bit her lip. "Until Romani returns."

Outside, the deluge continued beating a frenetic rhythm on the roof. The second day rain always lasted in bursts until late afternoon

She ducked her head. "Please. So I'm not," she inhaled, "so I'm not so alone."

Tatl chimed irritably. He ignored her and kept his focus on Cremia.

"Until then," he agreed, begrudgingly.

* * *

The two of them danced around one another in near-silence, with Cremia alternating between listlessly watching him groom Epona and do chores, or balancing on the cusp of saying something, and him fighting a silent battle with himself and with Tatl over secrets revealed at a time they shouldn't have been. Every so often, Tatl would almost apologize to him, or he would almost apologize to her, or Cremia would put her hand on his shoulder and look at him with a puzzled appraisal in her eyes. It sent strange fits of uncomfortable nerves through his body.

Cremia never let him out of her sight except when she finally fell asleep in the wee hours of the morning. At one point, she had even tried to convince him to sleep with her in her bed, but then laughed it off and offered Romani's instead.

He escaped from her just in time to find Romani herself wandering in the fields just outside the ranch house under the moon's watchful eye. How she got there was a mystery, as there were no witnesses, and she had no memory of ever going missing.

In fact, she had almost no memory at all. Romani recognized no one, not even Cremia, and spent her time either staring at the wall or staring at the empty pastures. She was, for all intents and purposes, a shell of who she used to be.

"Cremia," he said, when they were in the kitchen alone while Romani absorbed the moon hovering too closely above midday vista, "I'm so sorry. I have no idea what's happened to her."

Cremia shook her head, and leaned over the untouched food spread across the table. None of them had eaten- not Romani, not Cremia, not Tatl, and certainly not him. A curtain of her red hair shielded her face from him.

She was the only occupant in a house made for two, and the sight was terribly lonely in a way that the warm firelight emanating from the fireplace couldn't cure. Instead, it made the shadows deeper and the empty spaces larger. Romani's little chair and pink-rimmed bowl sat at her opposite like the furniture for a doll's tea party. That's all Romani was, now. An empty-headed doll.

"A red mare is an omen of good fortune," Cremia muttered. "Romani was so excited. That's why we took Epona in. When I realized she must have a master somewhere, I wondered…" She licked her lips. "Perhaps her age was what mattered. If she were older, then her appearance would mean good fortune."

The blue ocarina appeared on the linen tablecloth, beneath Cremia's left palm.

"Take it," she said. "You were right. She came back." She moved her hand to the table. "I'm sorry for troubling you."

He looked to Tatl, and then reached out. Instead of the ocarina, though, he took Cremia's hand.

"I'm sorry I couldn't be whatever it was I needed to be for you," he said, squeezing her hand. "You deserve better than this. I want you to know that."

"Don't draw this out any more," scolded Tatl. "We need to leave." Her impatience was abnormally terse and scathing, even for her. "We should have left yesterday."

"We still have time," he said. "Just a minute."

"You know," said Tatl, dripping hot, furious tears, "I was just teasing you before, but the way you act, I can see it, now. I was right the first time. I shouldn't have let you fool me, and after I even offered to take you back to the Kokiri forest!"

"Tatl? What are you getting at?"

"Your fairy's never coming back because you really did it. It's obvious. You see a pretty girl get sad, and you just have to help them. I get it now. I get it." Her fists trembled in the air. "I get it, you awful little slime!"

He leveled his eyes with her. "What do you get, Tatl?"

"You grew up." She spat the last words out like they were poison, like they were shameful.

They struck him like spikes.

"Tatl, if you don't want to be a part of this, you can step outside," he said. He was trembling, too.

Tatl's face screwed up into a decided frown. She looked from his and Cremia's hands to his face, and then shimmered her way towards the keyhole in a tearful fury.

"I think I will," she said. "I'll just leave you to it, you ungrateful wretch!" She squeezed her way through to the outside.

He took the time to watch her, took the time to feel the pulse in his ears and the pain in his chest. Tatl was dramatic, and selfish, and sometimes even cruel, and he knew it, but she could get under his skin like no one else he had ever met.

Later, when she was calm, and he was calm, he should tell her everything.

When she was good and gone, he turned back to Cremia. Where she had been bent over her plate, she now sat up in her chair with her neck craned towards him.

"Maybe for you, too," she whispered. Her hand was around his, and her eyebrows furrowed.

"I'm sorry?" he asked.

"Your age," said Cremia. "It was your age that mattered. Your real age."

Her eyes flicked over him, pensive. She stood.

He always knew Cremia was much taller than he was, but in this moment, the difference was unfathomable. She towered over him and cast a black shadow over his body.

"Cremia?" he asked. He backed up against the table. The linen tablecloth muffled the clatter of his sword and shield compressing against one another.

"You say the same thing that's happened to you happened to Kafei," she said. "I guess it makes sense, then."

His stomach twisted in knots and sweat doused the back of his neck. He felt like a mouse in the shadow of a cat.

"What do you mean?"

She moved a lock of hair behind her ear, and then bit her lip.

"At some point, in some today, I gave you Romani's Mask. I must have seen you as an adult then, too. Right?"

Her eyes made him feel slimy and disgusting in a way he couldn't explain. He'd felt this before, from other people, when his body had grown seven years beyond his mind. This wasn't the Cremia he'd met over lunch two days ago. This wasn't the Cremia who made toys for her little sister, or found excuses to give him prizes for his help.

He didn't know who this was, and he didn't know what to do.

"I'm sorry I didn't see it earlier. I must have sounded very condescending." She gave his hand a gentle squeeze. "I know this has been confusing. These past few days have been hard for me, but Tatl's right. I started to wonder earlier, but I should have accepted it right when you told me."

The Cremia he knew was comforting, kind, warm, maternal. He'd wanted her to hold him more, and longer, and tell him everything was going to be alright. No matter what the Mask of Scents might do to his nose and head, he realized, he wanted a mother, and had recognized it in her.

This wasn't that. This was not that same Cremia. Too much had happened.

She looked around the room- at anything but him, really. Her hands shook ever so slightly as they massaged his arms. "To tell you the truth, I don't, ah, I don't even know exactly how I feel."

He tried and failed to make the lump in his throat disappear. His body stopped working, and he found himself rooted to the worn wooden floor.

"Thank you for staying," Cremia murmured.

She leaned down. The smell of lavender in her hair was faint, but still there. The Mask of Scents had taken it and twisted it, and now it made him choke even without its power. It wafted forward with the waves of her red-gold hair, and soon he found his face captured in her palms. He was frozen in place, frozen in Cremia's glassy, fragile eyes. Her warm breath blew against his face.

White fog encircled his mind.

"No matter what happens, I can take satisfaction in knowing that I kissed a man before I died," she whispered.

And then, to his absolute horror, Cremia pressed her lips to his.

* * *

 **Author's Note: Thank you for reading! I hope you aren't too shell-shocked from this yet. This chapter was kind of, erm, hard. We're getting close-ish to the end, so hold on to your butts! Thank you as always to those of you who read and review. I try to answer all of you, but please keep in mind that when you don't log in, I cannot! I still appreciate your input regardless and always look forward to it!**


	25. Odolwa's Mask

The temple's damp, warm, putrid air lapped against the sweat on his skin like the tongue of an animal testing his flavor, and penetrated his nose like fangs in flesh. He hid his face beneath that of the lost Deku child, who could neither sweat nor smell, and followed the slick, crumbling pathways deeper inside.

The only light in this temple was what Tatl might have brought with her, and from the odd glow of the putrid water gathering in puddles and pools throughout the ruins. Empty braziers hid in the temple's dark corners like frightened children. He struck a piece of flint and lit them one by one, and Woodfall temple's broken body gradually revealed itself. During its long slumber, the serpentine roots of a great tree had penetrated the ceiling, dug through the floor, clung to the walls, and sewed the temple back together in a caricature of what it once was. Gaping holes riddled the passageways and dissolved the edges of the grand entry's sacrificial altars, and the remaining vestiges of the suspension bridges connecting the entrance to the central chamber trembled perilously in the flickering light. His lightweight body scaled the roots and columns of the crumbling room, and took great care not to disturb the spiders and shadows living just beneath his feet. The air grew cooler with each step he took, and soon, it was outright chilly.

Past the roots, under the moss, and beneath the dark mud, the temple's every surface was painted in reds and teals, and coated in gold. Amber and gemstone eyes in the temple's open-mouthed bas-reliefs slept through his visit under slimy, heavy, black-brown lids, never to open again. The poison pumping through the swamp's veins came from within these walls. Woodfall's heart had rotted away a long time ago, but it refused to stop beating. Deep in the temple, Odolwa marked its rhythm on drums and in chants like the great beast in the Hylian graveyard temple used to.

Odolwa, the warrior, the guardian, the last of the mortal giants of Old Ikana's dominion; taller than Keeta, older than Keeta, and unlike Keeta, without his mind. He called to his intruder with a challenge.

Odolwa guarded this ziggurat at Woodfall's summit in the Old Kingdom's stead. It stood for hundreds of years, and then some, and called across the four cardinal directions to Snowhead in the north, Great Bay in the west, and the Stone Tower to the east as a stronghold of prosperity and power; as a place by the Four Giants' ear, until Woodfall's swampy mire swallowed the temple whole, much like the open-mouthed reliefs in the walls threatened to swallow him whole if given the chance. Odolwa went with it.

Consumption: Majora's one true desire, and Ikana's one true legacy.

Carefully, he reached the back of the grand entryway and cracked open the door to the temple's central chamber. Dirt crumbled from the frame and fell on his hat and leafy hair as it slid open. Without his nose, he couldn't smell the poison on the other side, but the tender green leaves on the Deku child's body wilted beneath it.

The door opened to a platformed overlook, and water pooled in a glowing, poison lake beneath it. At its center, a painted, five-armed structure arranged like a flower of wood and metal protruded from the water, inert. Spined, blood-red flowers grew up from the water around it. Their yellow and black centers leered at him and his wooden body like the monstrous eyes of the temple itself. They were disappointed; wood was not good to eat, and it took so, so long for it to fall to the swamp's poison. The filthy taint of the purple water coursing through the veins of the Deku tribe discolored their leaves and clouded their minds with suspicious, baseless anger, but their bodies soldiered on through the madness. They would keep living until the water corroded all of their reason, all of their mercy, and sent them at one another armed with torches.

It was beginning. At the foot of Woodfall, the Deku king and his subjects were preparing to boil a monkey alive for a crime he never committed.

He counted to ten, held his breath, and removed the mask shielding him from the putrid water. His body stretched and grew to its normal proportions. He produced his bow and a red-tipped arrow, the latter of which he poised to strike the pile of suspiciously fresh kindling sitting on the five-armed device at the center of the room. As he notched it, the arrow's tip ignited, and soon a mane of white-hot light formed an unnatural corona around the entire head even in the damp air.

The machine's engine fed on fire. The Deku princess and her escort knew that, and had left it here before Odolwa had carried them off for fear that they might light it and bring the unthinkable into a place as dark as this.

He fired. His arrow struck the kindling, and set it ablaze.

The machine groaned, and then extended its five arms like a lotus opening under the afternoon sun. With a series of slow, crescendoed thuds, the flower rose from the water and began to spin in a labored circle, and then faster. The vines cutting over and under the machine shredded and lifelessly fell to the water.

He put away his bow and watched as the machine swiftly made up for years of undone labor.

The ziggurat was, among whatever else it was to the old kingdom, a filtration system, as was the mechanical behemoth in the mouth of Great Bay. Old Ikana knew that the water was the lifeblood of Termina, and they sought to keep it pure, keep it flowing, make it last forever and ever, and position themselves as its chosen master.

Alas.

Once upon a time, Granny said, Woodfall was not a swamp at all, but a volcano wreathed in ash and fire. The relentless rain of time crashing down on it bored out its fiery center and filled it with life and a lake; perhaps, some said, because the water was originally the tears of a Giant mourning the endless suffering of the creatures in the fire. In sadness, the Giant curled up on the mountaintop, and their grief-stricken body suffocated the violent mountain until Woodfall breathed ash and flame no longer. Later, when the Giants left the people and entered their forever slumber, the one who went South returned to that same spot, returned to the Giant's Cradle, until they faded from the people's memories and disappeared for all of time.

Beneath the ledge, the water's tint was slowly changing from ethereal purple to clear, and the yolk-yellow eyes at the center of the red flowers shrivelled and warped from the whirlpool generating around them. He hopped down from the upper ledge into the steadily churning water, and let the current carry him to the edge of the stone walkway running along the perimeter of the room. His memory was a fresher and more reliable map than the crumbling paper one stashed away somewhere in these ruins: he didn't hesitate to pull himself onto it and uncover a vine-covered metal ladder hidden against the side of a pillar protruding from the wall, and he only stopped to protect his hands from the rust before climbing it. Another stone walkway waited above his head, and another door, and from there another pool of water and series of rooms spaced out along its edges. Very straightforward.

When they first got out of this place on a day much like this one, Tatl had asked him, "Hey, have you done this kind of thing before?" like a mild thought expressed in passing, but now she had the audacity to act betrayed that he might not be what he seemed when it wasn't convenient for her to go along with anymore.

He pulled himself from the top of the ladder and said, to nobody in particular, "Even if I hadn't been here already, it's not as if anyone else ever expected a fairy to stay and help me with this, anyway."

His life as he knew it started beneath the branches of an unfathomably old and unfathomably wise tree who granted his Kokiri children protection, companionship, nourishment, and love. The other children thought it peculiar and frightening that he could never quite fit in with the rest of them. They made fun of him to his face for a laugh, and then, when night fell and the creatures of the darkness reminded them that their worst fears did exist deep inside the Woods, they whispered about him- about how strange it was that he used to be so baby-small but now reached their height, about how he might one day grow even bigger, about how awful his world sounded when he talked about his nightmares, about how impossible it was that he had no guardian fairy. To them, he was frightening, and of them, he was frightened. His only friend was a girl more forest than human for all the years she'd been there, and more of the Woods than the Kokiri for all the time she spent beyond the borders of her father tree's haven. She taught him to question the world and play the ocarina; how to think, how to laugh, and how to love. The other Kokiri spoke of her with reverence and flabbergasted befuddlement, and sometimes blind admiration, but always with respect.

Her name was Saria, and if ever there was anyone in his life he loved beyond his means and beyond his understanding, it was her. But she didn't exist anymore, not really, and that loss was inexplicable to anyone but him. At the end of his story, the memory of her existence faded away as dust on the wind from all minds but his, and her name was forgotten under the stream of rewritten time by everyone but him. Her absence was a gaping wound in his chest that nobody else could see.

Navi had left him, too, but Saria had been the first to leave- and one of the few he could say with certainty had done so not because she wanted to, but because she had to. Tatl was another of the former, and that was the way of it.

He opened the door to the next room.

The water's smell was still awful, but the central turbine had already made a marked improvement in the water's color from what it would have been fifteen minutes ago. He yawned, rubbed at his eyes, and wondered very seriously if he should put the All Night Mask back on to keep him from falling asleep. Outside, it wasn't yet noon, but he hadn't slept since Tatl had left him in a screaming fit on the second day in the cycle prior to this one.

He pulled it on, just in case, and readied his bow with another magical arrow as he stalked down the walkway to the old doorway at the end. The damp air by the arrowhead hardened and crystalized into ice at its touch. He winced as its frigid bite threatened to take the feeling from his fingers before he so much as loosed it.

In a place as wet and cool as this, the ice arrows might as well be the incoming moon for all the destruction they could cause.

On the other side of the door was the Gekko, a grotesque, monstrous frog swollen with the temple's poison. It liked to lure its prey into its abode and feed them alive to its servant creatures. Its addled mind took great pleasure in causing terror, and without that to entertain itself, it either soaked in one of the deep puddles of water scattered in the room or hung itself from the ceiling to lap up any new droplets soaking through.

He squared up to the door and kicked it with his boot. It slid open, and a dozen glowing eyes turned towards him, befuddled.

He shot a single icy arrow into the room before any of the creatures- the yellow-eyed tortoises, the fire-breathing lizards, the man-eating spiders, the grotesquely sizes dragonflies- could think to stop it. The arrow's frigid magic infected the saturated air, and by the time its trajectory brought it to the center of the Gekko's favorite puddle, half the room and the creatures in it became ice sculptures of themselves. He reloaded and fired another arrow, and another, until the entire chamber was a uniform mass of ice.

Then, he pulled a series of gunpowder sacks from his bag, lit them, and tossed them inside before closing the door.

Just to be safe, he counted five minutes after the explosion sounded before opening the door and venturing in.

The chamber was barely recognizable. Where patches of ice abruptly ended, black-ash holes marred the stone floor. Icy monster limbs- a head here, a leg here, what must be a shattered shell- littered the edges of the room, where they had fled the destructive light of the blasts that took the rest of their bodies.

He caught sight of his masked reflection in a prism of half-frozen water clinging to the wall. Once, he was afraid to so much as trap a squirrel or clean a fish when he was hungry and cold. Now, the All Night Mask made him into a red-eyed, unblinking, smiling monster standing among the carnage. He didn't recognize himself.

It occurred to him that Tatl's curiosity about his competence at this sort of thing wasn't because he was adaptable and competent- it was because he was downright merciless.

He reached to take off the mask, but a cold, slimy weight fell on his shoulders and peeled it off for him before clawing at his eyes.

He screamed and threw his hands to the top of his head in an attempt to push the creature off of him, but the Gekko dug the spiny claws on the edges of its webbed feet deeper and deeper into his face, and, with a strangled cry, bit down on his arms and hands with its sharp teeth.

They struggled, and soon the Gekko pressed its forelegs against his windpipe and squeezed. He tore at its hold with one hand, and with the other, pulled out an arrow and jammed its point blindly behind his head until the he felt something give. The Gekko screamed and fell to the frozen ground.

He turned around and drew his sword, but there was no need for it. The arrow jutted diagonally through the Gekko's head, and even though its body still wriggled and screamed on the ground, it wasn't long for this world.

He braced the creature with his foot and pulled the arrow from its head. Its eyes clouded over, and then, it stopped moving.

He took a second to breathe, and then peered up at the ceiling for signs of any more stragglers. He found none- only a perfectly circular patch of unfrozen stone large enough to encircle exactly one Gekko.

Of course.

He looked back to the dead monster. Its white, needle-like teeth fell from its black lips, and the sickly orange color of its skin bled from its pores and onto the icy puddle like ink.

In the span of time it took for him to blink twice, the creature on the ground was no longer a grotesque monster, but an innocent, spotted frog. It sat up, suddenly unharmed, and then watched its former adversary with bulging bug eyes and bulging vocal sack.

"Ribbit," it said, and traced him over with glassy eyes.

He looked around the room- at the frog, at the dead monsters, and again at the frog- and cleared his throat. "I've come to, ah," he felt outrageously out of place, "I've come to tell you that spring will be coming to the mountains very soon."

"Ribbit," said the frog.

"You should make your way there," he continued.

"Ribbit," said the frog.

"Do, do you understand me?"

The frog blinked at him, once, and then tilted its head in consideration.

"Ribbit," it decided.

He felt his face heat up in embarrassment. Frogs could talk if they were old enough- everything could talk if it was old enough- and he hated when people and creatures condescended to him when he very clearly was _not_ acting the part of a clueless, dull, unaware Hylian child.

He pulled out Don Gero's mask and shoved it over his face. Putting a frog on his head after so soon removing one from the same spot struck him as some sort of involved cosmic joke.

The frog croaked, again, and for a minute he thought he might punt it across the room, but then its croak lengthened and formed into words.

"Ah, Don Gero. Has spring finally come to the mountains like that strange child was saying to me?"

He reached out his hands to grab the frog by the throat and return the favor of what it had done to him not a moment ago, but stopped himself.

"Yes," he said, through gritted teeth.

"I understand," said the frog. "I shall return to the mountains as soon as I can." It blinked. "It will be so nice to see the others again."

"Yes," he said, "I'm off to summon them, as well."

"It's such a shame," continued the frog. "Woodfall is no longer as clear and beautiful as it once was. Even I was powerless to resist the evil once Odolwa turned."

"I can't say I know why you think you might be above that."

The frog laughed- a noise like air wheezing out of a balloon at high speeds.

"Oh, Don Gero, always a jokester. It's nice to know you haven't changed all these years." The frog sighed. "I swam down to the temple to see what could be causing such a malady as this, but the curse pulsing from this place ensnared me, too. I can only hope the guardian of the swamp below wasn't ensnared like I was." Its round eyes blinked at him, just barely out of sync with one another. "You'll have to thank that strange child for me. His approach could use some fine-tuning, but he was very effective."

Don Gero's golden, popped-out eyes didn't portray any emotion, but beneath them, his wearer's narrowed.

"...I'll be sure to tell him," he said.

"If he's feeling more clever, he might be able to free Odolwa of his mask," said the frog. "The Royal Family. They should have destroyed all of the relics associated with that old god, not given them to their generals. If only Odolwa could have abandoned that old mask before it was too late…"

Tomorrow afternoon, In the deepest chamber of the Woodfall ziggurat, he had decapitated Odolwa by the light of the flames the giant warrior set to frighten his opponents. However, the giant was long dead before the blade ever touched his neck. His blood had congealed in his veins, and instead the poison of the swamp coursed through him and animated his wrath. His skin greyed beneath his warrior's paint of bright red and deep blue, and the rancid smell of his rotting flesh brought forth droves of insects great and small. They followed him in a cloud, eager to feed on any creature unfortunate enough to cross his path.

When he fell, his insects fed on him instead.

The frog croaked, again. "You have to be careful in choosing who you surround yourself with," it said. "Betrayal leaves the kind of grief that will infect you from the inside out, if you aren't careful."

"Yes," he said, thinking of Navi, and of Tatl, and Cremia, and all the people who made decisions for him without asking him what he might want. "Yes."

He looked down at the patches of ice thawing at his feet. Don Gero's big eyes and green skin stared back at him without an opinion. Odolwa had been slowly eaten alive from the inside thanks to a curse he was powerless to stop, much like Jabu-Jabu, like Death Mountain, like his father, the Great Deku Tree.

Like he felt was happening, now and for almost as long as he could remember. Odolwa's crudely painted wooden mask stared out at the world with a fearsome visage, but when he had taken his sword and peeled the mask away from Odolwa's head, the face underneath was gone. He had been whittled down until nothing remained but the facade.

The frog hopped away, towards the door on the far side of the room. "There's no point in lamenting it now," he said. "Odolwa himself has long passed. All that's left in his place is a large shell, and an even larger problem someone needs to solve."

About halfway to the door, the frog paused. "Oh! And if you see that strange child again, tell him to get an antidote for when I attacked him while I was out of my right mind."

He looked up from his reflection in the ice. "Huh?"

The frog jumped up and down. "I _am_ poisonous, you know!"


	26. Gyorg's Mask

The sallow surface of the western ocean stretched thin over the horizon with few disturbances surfacing through its membrane, and the wind cut through his hair as he sped swiftly across. The shore lay far behind him, along with the screaming, hungry gulls, and he had long since passed the twin black spires of Pinnacle Rock and the safe, sculptured splendor of Zora Hall. Only the Great Bay Temple punctured the waterline, and the mysterious, never-ending waterspout encircling its perimeter. The Gerudo pirates called it the dragon cloud.

Sometime in the great, vague, storied before, the coastline and the Great Bay Temple stood closer to one another, and tethered themselves together with bridges and ferries. But the years mounted, the blessings mounted, and the waves mounted with them until the ocean spread halfway across Termina field to hold hands with the Ikana River. The Giant of the West's last act before falling into the deep sleep of eternity was to lower the ocean's waterline by drinking it up handful by massive handful.

Granny said that the western leeves, still left over from the time of the ocean's overfull days, stood tall and proud in preparation for the waxing tide under the ever-closer moon, but the great ocean spirit had different ideas.

"No, the levees are there in the event that the sleeping Giant finally relieves themself. The ocean has risen and lowered at several points in its lifetime. It depends on when the Giant quenched themself and when they relieved themself," said the giant turtle. "Ho! Everyone knows that."

Unlike the personifications of Termina's fresh water, the frogs, the spirit of the ocean took the form of a turtle so enormous that the flora and fauna of the Great Bay mistook its back as an island, and took up residence on it. Currently, so was he, as the turtle was kind enough to soldier through Great Bay's unpredictable currents and tempestuous winds to ferry him to and from the old temple.

The turtle continued. "You land-dwellers pretend you don't know, but every sea-dweller knows that's where the salt in the ocean comes from. Old Ikana knew. _That's_ why they used this temple to separate the salt from the water instead of wasting their time with rock salts from the mountains! The loose detritus, the remnants form the land, the eroding bones of creatures, the piss of the Giant," said the turtle, "That's where the salt comes from!"

It laughed. The rippling sound sent tremors through the island sprawled across its back, and through the bodies of its passengers.

He took a swig of the antidote the twin witches of the swamp had given him for the Gekko's poison and gagged it down. The congealing blue ooze had the consistency of watery mud, and if it had tasted like mud, it would have been an improvement over the reality. The bitter drink left behind a spicy aftertaste that left his tongue halfway numb in his mouth.

"That's disgusting," he said, matter-of-factly, and stopped glaring at his medicine to instead gaze out over the choppy, discolored ocean and the isolated wall of water whipping around his distant destination.

"Hmm!" The turtle chortled. "You think that's disgusting? You? Little land-dweller?"

"Huh?" he asked, intelligently.

"What about your air with all your pollen in it? Hm? What do you think about that, knowing you breathe that in?"

He'd forgotten to listen. Usually, he was good about listening, but the sun and the salt and his lightheadedness was getting to him.

"What does that have to do with anything?"

The turtle chortled again. "Oh, come now. I know you are no ordinary child. You know what I mean."

At the end of a seven years that hadn't yet happened, when his body had grown and changed into that of an adult, a man with bloodshot eyes and yellowing skin lurking in the shadows of the ruined castle town looked at him with envy, and with a kind of greedy intensity that made his insides shrivel and his mouth taste like bile. He was a salesman of undead creatures, creatures without flesh, but thought that, if he'd had the face of a child fresh from a seven-year nap, he would have, in a manner of speaking, sold his own flesh instead.

Cremia's smell wafted through his nose, and his stomach tightened and wrung itself into coiled knots. His already dry mouth turned to chalk.

"Those eggs," the turtle urged. "Lulu's children. Surely, if you're going to use the body of their father, you should know about things like that."

He pulled his lips into a taught, unforgiving line.

In a time not long ago, but yet unreacheable, a god swallowed him and sent him deep into its slick, pulsing stomach. He met a Zoran girl who wouldn't leave with him until she'd convinced herself that the two of them would be engaged, and so, with him not knowing any better, they became engaged.

It took him more than seven years for him to figure out anything close to the definition of the word, and then, when his fiance disappeared and someone took those seven years and drained them from the world's memory like blood from dead livestock, it took him three days of knowing Kafei and Anju to come close to understanding.

"Mikau gave me the use of his body to save Lulu's children, and by extension, save the western ocean," he said.

"Mikau asked you to help Lulu," impressed the turtle, and turned its head to peer at its passenger. Its blue-green eyes glistened under thick brown lids like the ocean in its healthier days. Thick algae grew in the creases around its eyes and nose from centuries of sleep beneath the ocean's surface. "I may have been napping, but that does not mean I do not listen to everything that happens in these waters."

He bit the inside of his cheek and stared into the turtle's huge eyes. If it had really been listening, it had done a poor job of it. The turtle made its bed in the waters not fifty feet from where Lulu and her mother had lived all their lives, and had not noticed that the Lulu it wished goodnight and the Lulu it wished good morning were two different Zora.

Perhaps as denial, perhaps from forgetfulness, or perhaps as an immortal failing to distinguish between a figure of destiny and her predecessor, it proved that it didn't actually know anything.

"I have saved Lulu's children, and I will save her home," he said. "That is how I will help her."

The turtle considered him for a moment, and then closed its eyes and craned its neck to face forward.

"I apologize. I had not yet realized that someone had hurt you."

A volatile balloon of Indignation welled up in his chest. How could the turtle so matter-of-factly look away after saying something like that, like it had gleaned everything about him from just a long, watery-eyed look when it couldn't even tell the difference between two generations of Zora? That was like calling Kafei by his father's name because of his hair color, or mistaking Cremia for her little sister because she ran the ranch. It was like sending him back to a time where nobody knew him without stopping to even consider what he might want, or what the consequences would be.

It was like assuming him a liar for never explaining that in so many words that, yes, he had been a shapeshifter long before and long after this morning, and the thing he shifted into was an adult man.

"Most people don't," he admitted, glaring.

He drained the dregs of his potion with vindictive fervor, stashed the bottle, and then looked to the temple. It loomed closer, and large enough to strain belief. The wind blew stronger here, and the water around the edges of the turtle's shell churned in a steady clockwise direction that grew stronger the farther the creature journeyed.

"Oh?" asked the turtle. "I doubt that. I think they simply do not know what to say. Something that deep often makes the bearer of the scars seem difficult to talk to, because they often try so hard to hide it away that they forget who they really are, or they let it fester in the open and consume everything else about themselves." The turtle shook its head. "It's such an awful thing, these masks."

He leaned back against the palm tree and stared up at the fronds. They cut the sun from his face in thick strips of shadow and hid him from its blinding light.

Each mask he obtained, he obtained for a price, but each one taught him something he hadn't known before, or let him be more than he was. Darmani was kind, Mikau determined, and the Deku child was loyal beyond words, because its spirit was stranded without them. Without them, he was only himself, and he was not strong enough on his own.

"They've helped me just as much as they've hurt me," he said.

"That's the curse," said the turtle. "No matter how much they help you, they always hurt you. Once you put one on, you cannot escape."

"Hm," he said.

The wind picked up to a brisk and insistent pace. He pulled the chain of his hookshot from the handle, and used it to wrap the trunk of the palm tree and his midsection together. The hook, he buried into the dirt by his hands.

Soon, the wind was pulling at his hair and beating at the fronds of the palm tree above him. His hat would surely be gone, had he not tucked it away into his bag. He'd made that mistake the first time, and Tatl had almost been lost to the elements forever.

Not that it would have made much difference whether he had lost her then, or lost her now.

"Salt, little one," said the turtle suddenly, calling over the mounting wind. "Is that what you think the treasure waiting inside the temple is? Salt? Because Ikana paid the soldiers in salt?"

Perhaps it was cheating, since he had been inside the Great Bay Temple before, but the only salt left in the temple was the brine in the unfiltered water, and a few preserved barrels forgotten throughout the complex. Whatever the treasure might have been, it surely wasn't that.

Even so: "No," he called back. "I never paid any mind to the stories about treasure! I always assume those kinds of things are stories someone made up to give value to places like this, or to lure people to their deaths!"

"How jaded," said the turtle. "And yet, how noble of you to venture inside, anyway!"

"Don't patronize me!" he wanted to say, but nobody would have heard him, anyway.

The wind ripped at his body and threatened to strip the trees from the back of the turtle's shell, but they held fast to the surface even as the pliable trunk waved and bounced against the force of the elements. His body pressed into the unforgiving metal links of his hookshot chain, but he stayed in place.

Next came the water. It struck him at such speed, he felt as if he'd been hurled through a solid wall and not malleable liquid. The water pelted against him and forced its way into his clenched mouth, and stung his eyes and throat like a deluge of wasps prodding at his insides. For a moment, he thought he might pass out, but at the last blessed second, the turtle broke through the storm and calm air rushed to his face and lungs.

"Are you still there, little one?"

He coughed violently.

The turtle nodded. "Good!" it said, and ferried them both through the storm's eye.

The temple surfaced from the depths in the shape of a gargantuan fish. When it was new, the architects of Ikana decorated it in gemstones and polished its metal scales into a rainbow, surely, but the sun and the wind scaled and cleaned the outside of the structure until it was smooth, dull, colorless steel. It peered out through its wall of water with sightless eyes and a gaping mouth wide enough for five giant turtles. A single thick pipe ran from the back of its head to the tip of its upturned tail, though what purpose it served eluded him even now that he had crawled through this place once before to turn the machine off.

Lulu could have told him. Her ancestors defended the thing until Ikana crumbled, and they shut it down for what they thought was forever.

He supposed the pipe carried concentrated salt to the mouth in a slurry so that the sun's rays and the wind's attention could finish the job. Supposedly, salt poured from the fish's lips whenever the machine in its submerged base worked as intended, and supposedly, the water's abnormal temperature had to do with its abnormally high salinity.

As far as he could tell, the desalinated water was whirling around the temple's exterior as the dragon cloud, and growing larger by the day.

Much like Woodfall functioned as far more than a filtration facility, the Great Bay Temple produced not only salt, but defenses for the entire bay. The elements were its clay, and it could craft and release entire storms against the rest of Termina if given the energy and command. It was the crown jewel of Zoran design married to Ikanan engineering and resources.

They floated inside. A wide, grinning fish head mask greeted them from the entry arch as the turtle ventured into the generous harbor in the fish's chest.

The entry tunnel was unlit, but orbs of reflective crystal inset into the floor and ceiling caught the scant daylight from outside and magnified it so that even in total darkness, an entering or exiting ship could find its way through.

The turtle eased through the darkness and came to a stop at a metal landing leading to the temple's main entrance: a sliding bay door seven times as tall as he was, and twice as wide. The reflective crystals affixed to its surface glimmered blue-white in the silhouette of an octopus. A smaller door inset inside of it- the maintenance door- parted its tentacles into two sets of four on either side.

As he finished coiling the chain of his hookshot into the handle, the turtle extended its long neck to create a bridge from its back to the landing. Its passenger gingerly stepped across its patchy, spotted brown skin before making the leap from its nose to the platform. He settled with a wet, unsteady plop from the saltwater caught in his shoes, and turned around.

"Thank you," he said to the turtle, and waved.

It straightened its neck and squinted at him.

"You look pale, little one," it said. "Will you be alright by yourself?"

His tongue lolled in his mouth with thirst, and his head throbbed. Truthfully, his legs shook, his focus kept shifting, and the sweat beading on his forehead left him with chills. He had taken his medicine, but the toxins from early in the day still made him dehydrated and weak.

"I am going to have to be," he said, and tugged Mikau's mask from his bag before slipping.

His face changed first. His sinuses and features shifted and compressed until his cheeks and forehead flattened against his skull before sloping into his long, sleek, pronounced nose. A fishtail sprouted from the back of his head, and as his body lengthened and grew to twice his original height, his skin fragmented into scales and pushed out a set of green fins along his forearms. His toes fused together in his shoes, and soon, his feet flattened into flippers and folded to fit.

Immediately, he could feel the moisture in the air penetrating the pores in Mikau's skin. But it didn't quench the thirst leftover from the elements and the antidote. He clenched and unclenched his fists and did his best not to wonder where his fingernails went.

Tatl thought that his transforming into a Hylian adult was unforgivable, but why was a Zoran man any different? She had seen this before, and said nothing. She had seen him become an adult Goron, and said nothing then, too.

"There's nobody left to come after me," Mikau said, and hurried up the ramp to the temple's bay door- and then the smaller maintenance door inset in the center. It slid open at his touch, and let him through.

The artificial fish was, predominantly, a facade to make a cohesive whole out of a varied and divided operation. It sat upon a thick, tangled bed of pipes deep beneath the water's surface that pierced through its belly and tangled through its innards like giant, ravenous eels cutting out of their caves in the ocean floor and through the stomach of their hapless prey. Inside, the temple was a mess of ornately crafted pipes, valves, and waterwheels undercut by a maze of walkways and waterways leading from one piece of the puzzle to another. The mounted, metal maps in the walls did little to illuminate the secret inner workings of the complex, but they did inform him which pipes carried inbound water, which ones funnelled the outbound water, and which ones controlled the direction of the waterwheel spinning counter-clockwise above his head.

It didn't matter. His target waited in the first of two maintenance chambers deeper inside the complex, not in the snarl of pipes. He strode across the metal walkways and winced with each timed burst of water from the release valves spread along his path, and at the answering thud of the water-propelled pistons set into the walls. Both took the shape of gleaming golden fish, and they ogled at Mikau with vapid gemstone eyes until he passed through the door of the next room and shut them out.

The complex's central turbine greeted him with a hot swell of air and a steady roar as it churned the deep reservoir of water pumping in from outside the temple walls.

He was so thirsty.

Woodfall's central turbine was finished in stained, sealed wood, painted, and beautified to form a flower, but beyond the striated ridges in the propellers spinning the water, Great Bay's was too immense to warrant such a treatment; one stirred a crater lake, and the other an entire ocean. Nearly every waterway of the complex emptied or started from this room, and one of the many passages and tubes branching from the submerged ten stories beneath his feet.

Once, someone said to him that time was like water. It flowed in a river throughout all of existence according to a natural course. But what happened if something, someone unknown, someone foreign, were to change that course? He had established his dam of three days before the end of the world, but what if someone plunged a pipe into the river and siphoned it out to split the river in two? In three? What next? Would the unnatural tributaries rejoin the river once again, in the future? Could he know? Could anyone know the consequences of splintering time?

Was he doomed to run far away, and run thin, and dry up into nothing more than a dead end long-separated from the rest of the river?

If only this water wasn't full of salt! He was so thirsty!

Mikau took a deep breath, waited for the propeller to pass, and then dove into the water. His body cut through it like a knife.

The ocean outside was abnormally warm, like bathwater, but the heat from the machinery made the water inside outright uncomfortable. He grit his teeth and steered his body with the current towards the wall, and counted the colored pipes disappearing into the branching passageways until he found the one he was looking for, and followed it.

Dangers festered in the hot water, and in the absence of any sunlight. The glowing crystals spaced throughout the passage illuminated only pieces of them- an eye, a tentacle, a long, hungry tooth- and Mikau's body pulsed with an electrifying energy in warning to every one of them. The stupid ones would follow his light and die in it, while the smarter ones would leave him alone in favor of what he picked off.

The tunnel's ceiling went away, and he penetrated the water's swiftly flowing surface in a graceful leap before landing on a textured metal platform.

He took a moment to breathe and regain his bearings. The water's heat left him dizzier than before, and he was tempted to suck down handfuls of it regardless of the consequences.

He abstained.

The insulated, core chambers of the complex ran hotter the farther removed they were from the rest of the ocean. The only exceptions were the chambers closest to the main pump, which the engineers designed to freeze lest the mechanism overheat at its most central, crucial junction.

Gyorg, the spirit of the temple, knew this. She cloistered herself inside the machine's core, where nothing could reach her, and hatched her children.

Lulu's fate, and that of her children, were forever linked with that of the great fish. Her mother, and her mother's mother, and even beyond were a living link to the temple's power, just as Mikau's family was forever destined to fight in her line's honor. Mikau and Lulu were bound by more than love and promises; their fates intertwined like the blue and red of the tattoo on Mikau's arm, the blue and red over Darmani's arm, and the blue and red spread across Odolwa's body. Lulu lived as Gyorg lived, and Mikau's lived to protect that balance.

Some fools believed his fate was the same, bound to that of the Hylian princess, his princess of destiny. Maybe it had been, and maybe they had been, when the symbol of three triangles shimmered brightly on the back of his hand, but now it was nothing but an old, dull scar. Her river flowed east, and his flowed west.

The balance of the ocean had changed, too: Majora infected the temple's engines with enough dark power to steal all of the water from the ocean, and the desire to take the lives of everything in it. For Lulu and her family to live, Gyorg and her brood must die.

Mikau sucked in a breath, and stood back up. The spirit of the river that long ago flowed to this ocean waited for him in the next room, trapped. His feet splashed through the water pooling along the path to the door towards it, unsteady.

Ice. that was his solution last time, and a potent option. He took off Mikau's mask and readied himself to throw open the door and freeze the whole damn thing from ceiling to floor.

He tapped the door with his foot to set off the sensor. It didn't move. He tried again.

It was locked. He didn't have the key, and forgot all about it.

He cursed. It was somewhere in these waters, sitting in a pool at the end of one of these pipes, where someone had tossed it so many years ago. But which one? Which reservoir? He could see them all in his mind, but it was so hard to retrace the path to it. Did he need to make the waterwheel turn the other way and reverse the current?

He couldn't remember. It was so hard for him to focus. He was standing on dry land, and his vision was swimming in the heat, in the wet. The witches' potion should have taken effect not long after he finished it, so why did he feel so weak?

He slumped against the wall and stared at the underbelly of the colored pipes weaving through the ceiling. Yellow overlapped red overlapped green overlapped blue, and though he had only intended to rest for a minute, they started spinning and he realized that, yes, this might be the end of his river.

The room went dark, and the rush of nearby water passed beneath him again and again and again.


	27. Don Gero's Mask

Hyrule's creation happened in a finite set of three. First, the earth, second, life, and third, reason. Whenever the three intersected in perfect, sublime harmony, the Sacred Realm existed. If a mortal managed to gain entry, they could see the entire lifespan of the universe forging its way forwards into the future; glowing within the ineffable, inky darkness. It was a river with no beginning and no end.

He had been granted entry. He had seen it. He had slept in it for seven years.

The water became as light. It fell from the darkness above and ran down his hair, down his shirt, down his body even as he lay half-here and half-somewhere.

In those places nearest creation of worlds, or of fresh, new moments in time, or those moments nearest the presence of divinity, the river spread around like a misting of clouds at his feet. Rainbows scattered from prism droplets suspended in the air and introduced whole spectrums of color to the otherwise blank canvas, and to the metallic gold ornaments holding together the princess's pink and white dress.

In his hand was the blue ocarina. The princess's were held out towards him, open and wanting.

"Please," she said, with painted lips. "Let me send you back to when you belong. To the way you belong."

Seven years had passed through darkness, but now, Hyrule's future scattered in bright rainbows cast by the river's new, forging course.

"Please," the princess implored.

The rapids behind him were brutal, dark, and fraught with bloodshed and peril. It was a course she had schemed up and convinced him to follow; it was a course that began when she implored him to open the Door of Time and let the water of an impure present taint the future. To give her the ocarina was to send him back to the beginning and relive it again.

Without his permission to open the Door of Time, the misfortunes brought by her mistakes were only dust in the wind. Without his cooperation, she could never scar the world with such deep consequences ever again.

But he was a fool. He so deeply wanted to trust, and she needed someone to trust her to bolster her bad ideas. He gave her the ocarina, and with the ocarina, the power to direct the River of Time. With the power to direct the river, she held the power to decide his fate.

The princess took the ocarina, put it to her lips, and as she breathed notes into the stomach of the crystalline blue instrument, she splintered the river in pieces.

Seven years regressed, and he found himself numb and alone in new waters that knew nothing of him. There was no oncoming death and destruction, but neither was there Saria, Ruto, Darunia, Impa, Nabooru. They existed as whispers from a Sacred Realm that was neither of this world nor not of it. Their names in the world were forever unknown- and so was his.

When he returned to the princess called Zelda, and to the Kokiri, and to his father the Great Deku Tree, he asked if they knew his name, they had no answer to give him.

Zelda gave him the ocarina instead, just as clueless as he was when he gave the same thing to her. He took it and walked away.

His own fate was half his fault, and he couldn't forgive himself, but half of it was hers, too.

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

Cremia leaned over him, her hand on his, her hand pinning him to the table. Her lips were wet. His body was numb.

The firelight crackled in the ranch kitchen, and then snapped once, loudly. It was the sound of cataclysmic destruction made miniature; it was the sound of the world colliding with its end. The earth rumbled.

He pushed Cremia to the ground. Her knees hit the wood with a thud as he tucked the cracked ocarina into his white-knuckles hands and strode single-mindedly towards the exit. The doorknob turned easily in his hand.

"W-wait," sputtered Cremia from the floor. "I don't understand. Did I do something wro—?"

He snatched his bag from the wall and slammed the door behind him in one action. The late afternoon light filtered through the western trees, far beneath the moon's focused stare.

Outside, Epona whinnied and pawed the ground. Her red fur vibrated in contrast against the green, sun-bathed grass. His feet journeyed towards her with determined strides.

The door to the ranch house opened again. A barefoot Cremia spilled out of it.

"Wait," she cried, desperate. "Wait! Please!"

He slung his gear over his back, mounted Epona with practiced, clockwork precision, and set her running towards the ranch gates. The green scenery whizzed by his head as he passed through Milk Road, passed by the hand painted signs to the Gorman Brothers' homemade racetrack, passed by the thicket calling him back to the swamp, back to Woodfall, back to the Deku child's home, where he could disguise himself in safety for the rest of these three days, like none of this had ever happened. He rode so quickly in the reverse of Romani Ranch that his surroundings passed him by like time rewinding on its spool.

Eventually, Epona slowed to a stop. She could only run so far and so hard. They were alike in that way. He cut through the fog collecting in the corners of his rattled mind and looked around.

The grass here was deep, emerald green, like the deepest leaves on the oldest trees in the Woods. The grass became greener, coarser, and taller the farther south it sat, until it either became the trees of the surrounding forest, or plunged into the mud and marsh of Woodfall's swamp. The vast, thick, greying stumps of the older forest, the stumps of the trees the people of Clock Town had long ago cut down to build their homes, littered the southern field like the sinking islands of an archipelago scattered over the ocean.

This had been his first look at the land beyond Clock Town's walls. This had been the place Tatl first met the Skullkid. This was Termina, land of the end, and of the beginning.

The earth beneath them trembled in terror at the third day. Epona's hooves skittered nervously over the dirt until it stopped.

Once, this place had been a nothing. Then, it had been a river, and then a lake, and when its waters receded even more, it became a forest on the edge of a swamp, and then, finally, a field of green lying in wait for the red-white wrath of the moon to suck the life from it until nothing existed.

The Clock Tower's half-hour bell cut through the silence of the orange sky like a beacon through dark waters. He set Epona on a course for the Southern Gate, and the stained wooden walkway leading from the wet soil to the entrance.

Long ago, Granny said, when the universe was young, before the four worlds, Time bubbled forth as a great spring. From the spring sprang four children, four Giants, and from the Giants' hands came Termina's four worlds. From their footprints came the first lakes, and the worn, repeated paths they tread became the rivers. They made valleys and deep craters in the mountains for their beds, and lush greenery for their blankets.

All was well and perfect, and the Giants delighted in their creation, but still they felt lonely somehow. Their worlds were too vast, and too empty.

Then, the imp appeared.

In Termina field, night fell steadily. The blue-white flames of the will o' wisps sparked and sputtered in the beams of the setting sun, eager to light up the oncoming darkness.

A covered wagon circled the town's eastern perimeter and passed him by. The driver's pale, tired face and heavyset body turned towards him with slow, resigned deliberation. Her shoulders slouched beneath the weight of the decision, like she was pulling the burden as well as driving it. She didn't speak a word, but he knew her harsh, low voice by heart from cracks in walls and floorboards over his head, and how she urged her mules onward, towards Milk Road.

He watched the cart pass. Beneath the canvas cover sat Anju with her Granny, and all the worldly possessions they could carry with them. The white taffeta and organza of Anju's wedding dress failed to grace his sights.

Granny's old eyes did, though. She singled him out in the field even though his green hat and green clothes should have made him invisible in the southern grass, and reached out her gnarled hand. Her lips formed a name that he couldn't hear, but knew very well.

"Tortus," she implored, with wide, glassy eyes. "Tortus!"

(The imp did things with no purpose, and played games with pretend objectives. The imp taught the Giants mischief, riddles, and whimsy. The Four marveled at the creature's freedom and energy, and welcomed him through Termina's many doors. In fact, they were so inspired, they sequestered themselves away to create their own imps for their own worlds, and the people of the four worlds were born. The Giants presented them to the imp with excited pride, but the imp did not share their enthusiasm.)

He waved. She would forget him in twelve and a half hours, maximum.

 _(The imp_ used to be the center of the Giants' world, not the people. How could he be happy, knowing they had made entire populations of creatures to replace him? How could he be happy, knowing they could make other friends whenever they wanted, but he could not? He expressed his displeasure to the people in the only way he knew how: he taught them mischief, riddles, and whimsy. He taught them to do wicked things with no purpose, and to play games with pretend objectives. But worst of all, and most important of all, the imp taught them jealousy, sadness, anger, and suffering. Once learned, the people could never forget them. Once learned, the Giants could no longer exist without them.)

"Tortus," Granny cried, even as the ground shook and threatened to throw her off the back of the cart. Anju threw her arms around her and stilled her reaching hands.

The cart trundled across the vibrant green carpet of Termina's southern field, and then disappeared into the ridge of trees heralding the entrance to Milk Road, as it always did just before the sun disappeared below the western ocean on the third day.

The bells of the Clock Tower rang six times. He eased Epona from the field and into the Southern Gate just as the sun finally set beneath the horizon, and only the moon loomed unbelievably large and close above the Clock Tower with hungry red eyes and gritted, grinding teeth.

The single soldier posted inside the town's wall beheld it with a wide-eyed, terrified stare and pale, shaking knees.

"Leave," he said to the soldier. "There's no use pretending any of this matters anymore. If you want to leave, just do it. Go see your parents."

The soldier bravely licked his lips, and shook his head. "But," he said, quietly, wonderingly, "what if it doesn't fall?"

The moon's eyes burned hotly in the sky, and the ground beneath their feet shuddered violently. Epona reared and shook her head from side to side, and the soldier fell on his rear and curled into a ball until it was over.

He steadied his frightened horse, and then, when she finally calmed, dismounted her.

"Go, if you want to," he said. "It is only going to get worse. I can't take care of you the way you deserve, especially if you don't want me to."

Epona snuffled, and spread her ears back over her head in uncertain caution. She danced on anxious hooves between him and the open gate before stepping outside the town walls and galloping across the grass.

He watched her go, resigned.

(The Giants banished the imp, and because they banished imp, they crept away to the corners of their four worlds to sleep away their sadness. They crept away to the corners of the four worlds to return to the spring from which they'd sprung, and to let Time wash away their grief.)

"You, too," he said to the soldier. "Follow the horse."

The soldier brought himself to his feet, and shook his head. "I can't. There are still people here," he said. "How can I leave them like this?"

He opened his arms and gestured to the empty plaza. The half-finished carnival tower rose over his head dressed in gold, red, green, and teal at the center of the empty, vacant vendor stalls lining the plaza's mosaic stonework. The only people the carnival setup would see were this soldier, the moon, a stray dog, and in another few hours, the drunken, screaming carpenter Mutoh- the very reason the soldiers were still made to man their posts.

"Who is left in this town to guard?" he asked the soldier, with rising heat. "Who is holding you back?! Who could possibly be so important that you feel you have to spend the rest of your life like this?!"

He made many mistakes in his life, some courageous and some not, but the two biggest mistakes he ever made were actually the same mistake made at two different points in time: trusting, against his better judgement, someone to act in his best interest in the face of real, obvious repercussions. Both times, the person he trusted was the princess Zelda.

"Who holds you back, sir?! Is it your captain, Viscen?"

"No!" said the soldier. "If he was the only reason, I'd've deserted a long time ago!"

" _Then who do you stay for?!_ "

The soldier wrung his hands on his spear, and furrowed his brows beneath his helmet like it should be obvious. "You, for starters," he said.

A thick and sudden stillness entered his mind. His hands shook like the ground beneath his feet. He took a step backwards, and then two.

Both times he'd made this mistake, he too had thrown himself into ruin blindly, and for someone unworthy.

" _Me?"_ he said, incredulous.

"Yes, you!" repeated the soldier. "Who else am I keeping the dangers out for, if not for kids like you?!"

The tide of tension permeating the night flooded through his ears and left them ringing. He licked his lips and looked around the plaza like he had never seen it before, like he was wholly and completely unaware of the twin sets of glowing eyes planted on him from above the Clock Tower and only the decorated, well-loved, and now empty streets had any meaning at all.

Clock Town was empty. Clock Town was mourned. Clock Town was loved, and he was a stranger.

"You're a, a fool," he said, stuttering. "I never asked such a thing of you. There are fewer things less dangerous than I am."

"Why? Because you have a sword?" The soldier smiled, almost, and wrung his hands on his spear. "You should leave," he urged, with one eye on the moon. "While you still can. Leave. It's worth it if I can get at least one more person out before it's too late."

"I, I..." he muttered, stumbling deeper into town, towards the Clock Tower.

"Hey!" called the soldier. "Wait! I meant that you should go the other way! The other way!"

He fled deeper into the plaza, and let the colorful posters and painted walls spin around and around him like the figurines on the top of a music box. He had run through here before, many times, with the moon bearing down on him and the eyes of Majora's Mask so horribly and hungrily close, but somehow the whole town looked frightening and new.

He stopped himself in front of the painted Clock Tower doors, and stared at the sliver of loose darkness settled between them. Inside was the Happy Mask Salesman, still waiting for his mask, and deeper inside was the strange metal door standing between Termina and the edge of the Woods, where his body lay sleeping.

He made his way here thinking he would pass through it and close it behind him forever. He made his way here thinking that he had been a fool to try and hold these three days close to himself, and forget that he had twisted inside long before he found this place. He made his way here thinking that he had been a fool to believe he could help anyone, and been a fool to think that they might know and love him.

"How can I leave you now?" he whispered to the Clock Tower.

For him. The soldier stood at attention in the face of his end for him. Tatl had left, Navi had left, Saria had left, Epona had left, everyone who did not want to use him had left, but the soldier stayed for him. He could not leave him now, not with an answer like that; not with the tools of his salvation so close at hand; not with only one mask left at the top of the Stone Tower.

He looked up at the Clock Tower's face and realized that he was ignorant from the very beginning.

Hyrule rode the current of Time at its edge, but the river did not begin there. It did not begin in all of Hyrule. It did not begin in Ikana, nor Woodfall, nor Snowhead, nor Great Bay. It began here, beneath his feet, and turned the gears of the Clock Tower so that the people could read the changing hours on the Goddess of Time's painted face.

This was Termina, the land of the end, but also the beginning. Termina existed wherever one world ended and another began!

Time was ephemeral, but ever-present, and the people of Termina honored her with a special mask that peered out from the epicenter of the four worlds, and masks that watched over them from walls in their houses. She passed ages with hands moving methodically over her face, and a voice that only sounded in hours. She had never asked anything of him, or of anyone; a clock had no mouth to speak such a thing. But, when the last moments came, and he and Tatl stood beholding the too-large eyes of the moon and Majora's Mask, when Tatl screamed and pleaded on both of their behalves for more time, Time had granted him the power to use as much of her as he wanted, and the power to let the her run out with the end of the world.

Time trusted him absolutely. She made his fate the fate of the future.

He found himself standing where Zelda once stood, and full of bad ideas. But he could not leave when the river of Time bubbled up from beneath his feet and granted his every request, good or bad.

"I have so much I should say," he whispered to the Clock Tower. "I have so much still to do. But I don't know where to start. Where do I go from here? Does this world, the world of the Giants' heartbreak and the imp's wrath, deserve to be saved?"

He swallowed. The night had grown deep and dark, and unspeakably silent above the rumbling earth. The vendors were gone, Guru-Guru was gone, Gorman, the Rosa sisters, the carpenters, Anju, her Granny. All gone. No smoke carried along the wind in the unnaturally silent, unnervingly clean town. No children marvelled at the beautiful, colorful flags and decorations hanging from the eaves. No one carried a light through the dark streets.

"I am alone now," he realized. "I am more alone than I thought I could be, and I am afraid."

The clock's massive gears turned under the stars, under the moon.

"Is this how the Giants felt?" he asked. "Is this how the imp felt? Is this how you feel, as your springs and rivers are fading, and Don Gero is no longer here to join them together? Flowers wilt, trees fall, and children," he hiccuped, "children age, but knowing doesn't make the seasons' passing any easier."

"This land was destined to fade," he continued. "I was destined to grow old and die a hero known by all in a land I was made to glorify. But look where I am. Look how I am. Witness the reward given for sacrifice."

He spread his arms out wide, like he could encapsulate the whole of Clock Town's emptiness in his wingspan.

"Listen, how everyone cheers! Hear how many people call my name; how many gift it to their children! See how the sun glints off my sword and illuminates awe on the faces of all who witness me! See how all creatures, all men, all _gods_ acknowledge me! _Know_ _me_ , and know that _I am lo-!_ "

The earth rumbled and demanded he grab the Clock Tower for support. His eyes watered over, and for a moment he swore he saw the faintest light and palest wings appear in the crack between the two doors. When he blinked and regained his bearings, the illusion was gone.

He snarled and wiped at his eyes without success. He tried until his throat closed up and sent him into a fit of sloppy, gasping coughs.

"I am a curse," he said, finally. "Truly. To protect me is to protect a vindictive monster, and to invoke my help is to call upon a shadow with no power but those I have stolen from others much wiser and stronger than I am. Whatever you ask of me, I can do, and I will do, but beware: whatever it is I take from you, I cannot give back. Whatever it is I give you, I cannot take back."

He presented the ocarina to the sky, to the Clock Tower.

"If you would choose to keep asking my help, I will keep righting the wrongs done to you and to Termina as well as I can in these three days. I cannot solve them all in the same three days, but if you choose the moments I make that please you, or at least the ones you find least offensive, I can- and I will- give you a composite of three days that will let you flow into a fourth, and a fifth, and as many as it takes before the end swallows you up anyway. I can't promise those days will be happy or easy. I can only promise to get you to them."

He held the cracked ocarina to his trembling lips.

"The choice is yours," he said, and played.

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

Author's Note: This is experimental, so I'm trying something with my timeskips (where they illuminate theme as I need it, whereas the order of scenes contain the contextual and character introspection in the order you the reader needs to understand what the heck is happening when your narrator, for example, goes into shock.) Thank you as always for reading and reviewing!


	28. Goht's Mask

He was in a desert of white. In front of him was a man dressed in black. That man, that warlock, that king, that thief- that thief who once stole the light, the river's flow, and seven years from his life. The two of them stood in a place beyond the forever darkness of the Sacred Realm, a place coated in a blankness that knew neither beginning nor end. No river flowed there, or anywhere.

They stood and stared at one another: him with mouth dry and eyes haunted, and the thief with foam on his lips and bloodthirst in his gaze. The desert of white steadily sucked them dry. The desert of white would leave them as bleached bones and ash.

When he thought he couldn't bear the thirst anymore, when he thought he couldn't fight back the void, when he thought he couldn't keep that man from reaching out and tearing him apart, that man's black silhouette grew, and grew, and grew, and then swallowed him in dust and cold shadow.

He fell. He fell forever, forever alone.

And then, heat. A light.

In the darkness, light. In the solitude, a voice. In the belly of the beast, where lurks rot and rust and death, life. It came for him, harshly, loudly, insistently, and on gossamer wings.

" _Wake up!"_

Fresh water poured into his mouth in thimblefuls between minuscule, needle-sharp pinches to his cheeks, to his nose, to his ears. Something cold sat below his back and under his jaw.

"Wake up! _Right_ now! You don't get to die before you've held up your end of the bargain! Hey! _Hey!_ Are you _listening?!_ "

He opened his eyes. A fairy of white light shimmered in front of him. Her glow chased the nightmares from his mind like the wind carried dust from a crypt unopened for thousands of years.

"Navi?" he asked, incredulous, and convinced that the dull thud of machinery and insistent rush of water filtering through his ears was somehow part of a great deception covering over the wooden walls of his forest home.

A splash of lukewarm water to his face washed away that impression. This was not the Kokiri forest, and the fairy calling him from sleep's grasp was not his. In front of him was Tatl, and on the ground in front of her was a bottle of fresh water. Two, actually, though the first was empty. His hand found uneven pieces of ice tucked in the fabric of his tunic, around his neck.

He coughed. "Why…?"

"Shut up and drink this," she said, and pointed to the other bottle, the full one, the one from where her hands had just scooped up the droplets now running down his face like seeds from a sack. "Small sips," she commanded.

He took the bottle and looked around at the pipes, the walls, and the rushing saltwater in confusion. A spent arrow protruded from a chipped block of ice gently floating and slowly melting in a reservoir to his right.

"You didn't dilute the potion before you drank it," said Tatl, urging the bottle towards his mouth. "And then you immediately _transformed!_ Stupid. The potions only work on humans! You _knew_ that!"

His voice rasped against the back of his throat. "How did you get here?"

"Just be quiet and _stay awake_. You're dehydrated, and you overheated. That's all," she said. "I need you. We made a deal," Tatl said. She wiped her face. "I need you."

He drank. She floated in front of him with her hands on her forearms, and watched the water move down his throat with glistening eyes.

"Time doesn't pass inside the Clock Tower," she whispered. "But looking out from the inside…"

He drank. She swallowed.

"I could see you, your back, appearing again and again, right where we began. I could see you and I running back and forth, back and forth, so tired, so ragged. The town emptied, the moon came closer, and then moved away, closer, and then away, until it didn't stop, but just kept coming. Its jaw opened wide, and, and, and the fire, the fire, it…!"

Tatl covered her mouth. He drank.

"I heard you," she said.

He drank.

"Every time. All the times. I heard you."

He drank, and ran out of water.

"The Clock Tower, she… she let me choose when to come back in. I hid. I hid in the Turtle's shell. I'm sorry," she said. "I never should have left you. I'm so sorry."

He held out the bottle. "Is there any more?"

Tatl's mouth screwed into a frown, and her shoulders shook. Her head shook from side to side. "No," she said. "I tried, but I couldn't. I tried, but you, you deserve," she swallowed, "you deserve so much more than that, but it's, it's all I've got."

He licked his lips and blinked. Two hours. He stretched his arms out in front of his face and tested his legs. He could stand, and the room wasn't spinning.

"It's enough," he decided.

Tatl chimed and rocketed into the air. "No! No, it isn't! What are you planning to do?! Huh? Something stupid? Something dangerous?!"

"No," he said, and pointed to a series of thin colored pipes threading through the ceiling and past the locked door to the Gekko's room. "You are."

Tatl's jaw dropped. "What?!"

"There's some kind of liquid freezing agent in one of these pipes, isn't there? It keeps the central mechanism cool when the water can't?

"Yeah, the purple one." She scrunched her forehead and followed the trail of his finger. "It's the same stuff that coats the magic arrowheads. Why?"

"Do you think you can bust the part of it crossing over the other side of that door and flood the room with it?"

Tatl raised her brows and examined the space around the frosted purple pipe cutting through the wall. She pulsed with a single, sudden, brilliant flash of incendiary light, and grinned.

"Gimme some gunpowder," she said. "That thing won't notice me until I've lit it up, and by then, it'll be too late."

He rummaged around in his bag until he found his bomb kit and pulled out a tiny sack.

"The door is closed, so you'll still have to squeeze your way out the way you came in. Are you prepared for that?" he asked.

"Yes," she said, and snatched the bag from his hands.

However, she paused just before she slipped through to the next room, and turned.

"I'm coming right back," she said. "Okay? I won't leave you, if you don't leave me. You got it?"

In his head, she was already leaving again, already flying to that tiny black hole like Navi had flown to the tall window white with blatant sunlight, never to return. She was a transitory blessing, and he a transitory visitor.

"You believe me?" Tatl asked.

"I believe only what I see," he said.

* * *

Snowhead: an elevator extending from the fiery depths of the earth's core to above a mountain's ice-covered peak. The bottom floors let the people leave offerings to the Northern Giant in their sleep, and the top floors brought them to the Giant's eye level when they awoke and stood to survey the rest of Termina. Old Ikana's mages and wise men used to meditate and pray for control of the elements in the many painted rooms spiraling around the walls of the interior.

Clouds of ice and snow encircled Snowhead's crown, and hailed their load down upon the rest of the mountain with the help of a sharp, merciless wind. Inside the tower, the air was tranquil, but so cold in places that the moisture in his breath turned to ice in front of his face, and so hot in others he felt his flesh cooking. The first time he braved the mountain with only his own power, his body threatened to give out before he reached the entrance. Without Darmani, he never would have made it.

The Goron's thick body shielded him from the worst of it, even at night. The tough hide and dense bodies of his people warded off both numbing cold and extreme heat, and so the temperatures of Snowhead's lowest lows and highest heights were a danger, but not a death sentence.

At the top of Snowhead slept the temple's guardian, locked away behind sheets of ice and a great metal lock. Darmani's huge arms turned the key inside the immense lock with bulging veins and flexing muscles. The lock clicked and fell to the floor without ceremony. The icicles glazed to its perimeter snapped like twigs on contact.

"You sure you have everything?" asked Tatl. "If this doesn't go to plan, we're both in trouble. You've barely taken a break. Just half a day and a few hours into the night, and you spent most of it acclimating to the elevation change."

"Travelling from below sea level to the summit of a mountain is quite extreme," Darmani admitted, but he grabbed the huge sack of rope and explosives sitting by his feet and carried it through Snowhead's massive door, to Goht.

"And it's _cold,_ " added Tatl, rubbing her arms.

Goht was a mechanical wonder. Ikana had built a creature of iron and copper, of gold and steel, and the mask on its face gave it a soul. The explosive beat of its metal hooves bored tunnels through solid rock, and shook snow from the peaks of the mountain where it ruled. Goht plowed through the ice and earth to reach those sorry souls buried beneath in times of peace, and cleared the passes of swaths of the kingdom's enemies in times of war. Granny said that some fools had taken to worshipping Goht, the golden bull, in place of the Giant who slept curled around the base of Snowhead. Now, though, the great guardian helplessly stood in a stasis of solid, merciless ice- the icy heart of the eternal winter.

If the ice melted, winter thawed to spring, but if the ice melted, Goht would run free, and run mad. Winter's cruel arms stopped Goht's engine and stilled its powerful legs, and Majora had taken this opportunity to slip dark fingers into the machinery and bend Goht to their will. Once released, Goht ran in circles without end; circles to start earthquakes, circles to bring Snowhead's towering height down around him. Goht ran with one desire: to be chased, to be played with, to steal away the attention of the people; to steal away the attention he had grown so used to, and had for so long been denied. Goht's heart was Majora's heart. Goht's heart was the heart of the imp banished so long ago, the imp who foolishly put on Majora's Mask.

He too was running in circles. He was running in circles of hours and days, not only because of his promise, but because he wanted attention, too, from someone who would never be there to give it to him.

What was that man dressed in black, that warlock, that _thief_ doing in his prison of white? Was he running in circles? Was he held captive in cold nothingness?

Darmani cracked his knuckles and strung the ropes in taught criss-crosses through the room around Goht. Between them, he placed explosives in heaping mounds.

The monster would run into a forest of rope. No matter where Goht turned, a snare waited to tangle its legs and sent it careening into a pile of gunpowder. Goht's time would end in ash and fire, and walls caving in over its head to put out its misery. Mercy and cruelty sat close together in his mind, but he was not one to separate friends when he did not have to.

"You might actually blow up the whole tower with this much," warned Tatl.

"I can't say that would be the worst outcome," he said.

"It will be if we're still in it!" countered Tatl. "I didn't come drag you from exhaustion just to get both of us killed!"

"Oh, I don't actually have a life to lose," he said. "This is all borrowed time anyway, for me."

Tatl turned red in the face and clocked him on the head.

"Ow!"

"Listen!" she said. "All this nonsense about life and time and curses and destiny- it's stupid! It's absolutely stupid! Okay?!"

Darmani's beady eyes blinked. "Well, yes, but it doesn't make it any less-"

"You _exist!_ " screamed Tatl, loudly enough to rattle the cave. "You have a face! You have a life! You have a _name!_ You exist, whether you think you do or not!"

"Tatl, I know I exist," he said. "That's the problem. I'm not _supposed_ to."

"You _are!_ "

"Tatl, I'm-"

"But you _are!_ " she screeched. " _You are!_ You exist, and you are meant to exist! Even if someone said you shouldn't, or made you think you shouldn't, other people want you here!" She pointed to herself. " _I_ want you here! I want you to stay! _I want you here as you are!_ I don't care what anyone else ever said to you, or even what _I_ said to you in the past!" Her finger pointed to the ground with definitive conviction, but her voice wobbled. "This is here, and this is _now_. You exist, and _at least_ one person wants you here."

Darmani blinked again, dumbfounded. His eyes began to water.

She inhaled a shaky breath, and then let it go like a piece of dandelion fluff to the cold air. "You can resent me, like you resent the princess, but it doesn't change the fact that I want you here. It doesn't change the fact that she hopes that the two of you will meet again. Even if you never forgive her. Even if you never forgive me. That doesn't change. That might not ever be enough to make you happy, but it doesn't change."

Darmani's eyes spilled over. Tatl had left him, like so many others had before, but Tatl had also come back. How could he be so blind? How could he be so cold?

Tatl's light flickered on the slick, frozen rock walls of Snowhead's upper chamber like a lone candle's persistent flame in the face of the cold. She sputtered and hissed and crackled and raged at him, and set fires in those places already volatile from dry anger, but come the water, come the mire, come the wind, come the storm, she refused to extinguish and leave him in the cold darkness.

"I don't resent you," Darmani whispered. "I can hold a great amount of evil in my heart, but there is only so much room inside of me for that." He shook his head. "None of it is meant for you."

Tatl wilted.

Darmani bowed his head and wept.

"Please, forgive me," he said. "I would take off this mask and face you myself, but I c-"

Tatl dashed forwards and spread herself across his chest.

"Forgive _me_ ," she said. "I already forgave you."

* * *

The light cut over the east, through the clouds, and to the valley. Snow still covered the ground, but made patches as its reign receded in the light. Green grass emerged at the edges, and purple flowers and yellow bees explored the air. The mountain spring flowed forth, unencumbered by ice, and the trees wore green leaves instead of white blankets.

The frog choir, the choir of the rivers and springs, Don Gero's choir, sang. But it was not Don Gero who lead them. It was a child dressed in green, ocarina in hand, with a fairy sitting on his shoulder. Her glow was the only light besides the red and rising sun.

He could not dance, and he could not sing. Some days, he could not be himself. But he could hear music like no one else, and he could play it like a language and draw it out like a light cutting through darkness. It was his greatest gift, and his first gift from the person he loved more than anything- a gift in the form of a clay ocarina.

Darmani's grave watched from atop the highest cliff on the valley walls as a group of five frogs, one boy, and one fairy conspired in the crystalline pond, and sang the song of a new year, a new season, a new day.

Dawn of the Second day. The choir greeted it with joy, for in the mountains: spring.

* * *

 **Author's Note: Thank you as always to those who read and review! We are about, oh... four parts from the end, now, I think.**


	29. Giant's Mask

The wind- that horrible, howling wind- cried down the hill, across the valley, and through the canyon of Ikana. It rattled the walls of the sealed castle, echoed through the dry and hollow well, and rattled the bones of the dead hiding in the graveyard. The cruel grit of the sandy earth clouded the air with yellow-orange dirt, and from it, the faces in the old kingdom's ruins emerged like monsters from mist. Its origin was the largest face in the canyon- a face looming over the ruined Ikana castle and dry riverbed with a long and hungry tongue reaching from its lips down to the ground. The figure's arms and legs squatted at the top of Ikana Hill, and above its arching head stood the monstrous, behemoth Stone Tower. Black eyes beckoned visitors to its tongue, beckoned offerings to its mouth, and called fools inside of its stomach, where the wind and way up the tower began.

The Tower was hollow at the center. The mouthy gate dumped entrants out in a coliseum of a courtyard covered in altars, torches, and fading painted symbols arranged on the floor. The surrounding walls displayed a metal skeleton beneath the flaking stucco facade, and the evenly spaced holes in the facade suggested that they were intentional; the Tower walls appeared porous from a distance, but up close, the gaps suggested massive windows looking out over Termina. The wind cut through them and stirred the dirt like it was water in a bowl.

His tunic flapped in the tower's dusty breath like a flag left on a battlefield long after the bodies had been carted away and the forces directed home in victory, or in defeat. The forest green color of the cloth still fought valiantly against the jaundiced wind even without a kingdom's support, and a hand over his face fought off the worst of the soiled wind.

However, he was not alone. Tatl wrapped his hat around herself as he changed faces to become something besides himself, and then coaxed the ocarina to let him shed his new, changed skin as a ghostly statue in the image of his disguise while he himself walked free.

The heavy and steady Darmani, the lithe and wiry Mikau, and the tiny wooden Deku child stood around him with vacant eyes. Weighted switches depressed below their feet in the order of some long-forgotten ceremony that only Igos du Ikana, the dead king of this dead land, could possibly know the origin of. Thick platforms carved in the shape of compacted black-eyed men moved out from the wall in answer to the arrangement, and slowly, the way to the Stone Tower's summit became clear even after so much time.

"A soldier with no heart," Igos had described the statues. "One who will not falter in the darkness."

Between the carved men's legs appeared a relief of three familiar triangles- the same three that once decorated his hand, and Zelda's hand, and the hand of that man, that thief in black. Long tongues extended from their mouths, and engulfed it. Hyrule did not infect Termina so much as Termina swallowed Hyrule. After all, Termina was on all sides of every world, wherever it ended.

Tatl squinted at the inscribed Triforce. "Do you believe in destiny?"

"Yes, but I also believe in coincidences, accidents, and that a fairy will come to me before I am thirty-five," he said. "So take that as you will."

"So you're younger than thirty-five?"

"I should be well under that," he admitted. "Hopefully. It's entirely possible that I slept through a few extra years that nobody mentioned to me."

After a minute of labored groaning and the whirring of a hundred unseen gears, only two thirds of the platforms extended.

Tatl looked down at the statues' feet.

"The Deku child," she said, pointing to the undisturbed painted switch beneath its feet. "It's too light."

"I can only create one of each shape at a time," he said. "Could there be a weight somewhere, or-"

"You," she said.

"I could stand on it, but once I move, the platforms will-"

"No, I mean make a statue of yourself," she said.

He frowned distastefully, but did as she said. No sooner had he finished Igos' melody did he look up from the ocarina and find himself standing in front of a grotesque, grinning replica.

It grinned like one of Ikana's many masks. It grinned like the Happy Mask Salesman. It grinned like it knew something, and he did not.

Sun-blonde hair, pale skin, bright blue eyes, and a tunic in the vibrant spring green of Hyrule's light-filled fields. All wrong. His hair was redder than it was blonde, travel under the sunlight had tanned his skin, and his mottled eyes only looked blue under bright light and deep scrutiny. The tunic was the greatest insult; he wore the deep green of the Kokiri, of Saria's sacred and favorite meadow, of the Lost Woods and forest, always. This statue looked like someone of a high birth wearing him as a costume. It was the princess Zelda masquerading as him.

He turned away so he couldn't spit on it.

"It's no less creepy than it was the first time I saw it," mused Tatl. "You've still got it beat, though."

He grinned despite himself and made his way up the series of platforms waiting to take him higher, higher, higher, and higher still, until the dusty air blotted out the ground below him when he looked down. He walked for hours.

Three times, the Tower asked him to recreate the ceremonial arrangement of bodies with his ocarina and masks. The way before him opened each time, but the way behind him faded away into the Tower walls and left him stranded on a series of islands high in the sky. To reach the top alone was impossible, and the sad, shambling corpses he found wandering around the higher altars bemoaned their fates before he finally laid them to rest.

The higher they went, the clearer the air, but the higher they went, the more he felt like he was walking into a dream. His breathing grew labored, the air grew thin, and his head light. The water and food he brought lessened in burden, and his rests shortened under the attention of the omnipresent sky. Daylight passed, and the stars appeared bright and clear in the sky before slowly fading in the light of the second day dawn.

The moon watched intently, and drew ever closer.

To climb the Stone Tower was to climb on the backs of those who built it, to use the people who carved their souls into the figures leading the way up into the sky, and likewise carve out soulless corpses of his own to command the way and give him the right of entry. To climb the Stone Tower was to shed his vessel, and leave that part of himself behind.

"Careful," Tatl warned, as he weaved towards the edge.

"Yes," he said, and shook off the fog as best he could before reaching a pinnacle so high that he felt he'd walked into a dream.

At the top of the tower, the face of the Eastern Giant called out to him, jewel-encrusted, painted in Ikana's reds and teals, and with a finger pointing skywards. They called to him with a hungry, open mouth that sucked him in, and with eternally burning red flames in its hollow eyes.

"I am afraid," admitted Tatl. She looked up to the vast spread of lavender-pink light painted above their heads. "The sky is," she shook her head, "so wide. I don't feel right."

"There's no way back down," he said, watching as the dust far below his feet stirred into mysterious, ever-changing shapes in the breeze.

"We should rest," Tatl tried, her eyes darting to and from the Giant's mouth. "You barely slept on the way here."

"I can't sleep in a place like this," he said.

He crossed over the Giant's painted teeth, and then beneath the man-sized red gem hanging at the back of their mouth. Tatl's light illuminated the dark hallway of the Giant's throat until the darkness faded and the inside of the Stone Tower Temple revealed itself.

An oculus in the skull of the Temple's great head welcomed the rising sun, and left him exposed and lost in a temple with no clear ceiling and no clear floor. Intentional, bordered holes and crisscrossing walkways riddled both in mirror images of one another, and threatened to let either him or the heavens fall through one or the other at any given moment. Directly in front of him was a wall built in the shape of a horned demon's face. One gold-rimmed eye held itself open to behold its guests, and an old, sturdy lock sealed the single door covering its mouth.

Besides that, the temple was empty.

"I don't feel right," whispered Tatl. "This place is cursed."

He could feel it on his skin, and at the back of his head. Here, everything about him was exposed and revealed. Creatures unseen and powers unnameable watched him through every facet of the temple. No matter what shape he might take, this place knew him as what he really was. His many masks' disguises were thin and ineffectual against the eyes of the Stone Tower.

He felt naked.

He turned and followed the walkways cutting around the demon's head until they lead him to another tower jutting up from the base of the complex. He opened the door to complete darkness, and cautiously stepped inside.

The room's still air smelled of old must and dry dirt. The shadows isolated him within the stone walls until a flash of sudden color in his peripheral vision spooked him into drawing his sword and striking. His target shattered on contact and revealed itself in disjointed pieces: his own pale-faced, sweat-covered, distorted reflection. A mirror. He was in a hallway of mirrors.

He cursed, and dropped his sword in favor of covering his face.

Seven years later, in a room covered with water so smooth and so bright that it acted as a mirror, his shadow appeared from his reflection and attacked him. The memory haunted him from then to now and beyond, and he could never trust his own image again.

Tatl chimed, softly.

He exhaled, gathered himself, gathered his sword, and soldiered onwards, through another door and into another maze of nauseatingly open walkways camouflaging into the ambiguous color of the dawn. He walked on air, on nothing, and willed himself not to look down even as the sun rose higher and higher overhead with the intent to blind him. He held out his hand to push its harsh rays away and risked his life step by step in the direction of another tower suspended in the air.

The murals on the doors and along the temple walls reminded him that even the sun sets, and must set, and that with its absence comes the moon and the darkness.

"How," Tatl asked, from her perch in his hat, "can it be so empty in here, but feel so threatening?"

He braved the rest of the walkway and entered the waiting door. Behind it was a circular room with a massive oculus staring down at them and an open, empty, decorated box at the center of the room.

Tatl darted from his hat and chimed in alarm.

"Bloodlust and gunpowder!" she exclaimed, and no sooner did she make her proclamation than an eerie wind blew inside and closed the doors behind them.

He pulled the Garo mask from his bag and threw it over his head.

"We are not your enemy," he said. "We have come seeking a way to break the curse placed over the Garo, and-!"

The wind took the shape of a cloaked figure with two blades, as all Garo do. However, this one's cape was deep, royal purple, and the mask over its face featured a gleaming golden crest and hook-like nose- the spitting image of his own. It stood tall and proud on invisible legs wrapped in thick, expensive cloth, and unlike the other Garo hiding away in the ruins far below, moved like it expected to be seen.

Hollow laughter rumbled from within its robe as it surrounded itself in foxfire and struck.

The screaming Mirror shield caught the Garo's harsh blade with barely an instant's grace. Heat bubbled around the metal surface and licked at its wielder's shins and hair, but the worst of it went around him while the Garo toppled off-balance from the recoil. He struck back with his own sword, but it barely sliced through the cloak's vibrant edge before the Garo disappeared on a new breeze.

"It's above you!" shouted Tatl.

He pulled his shield over his head and grit his teeth as the full weight of the Garo's strike fell on top of him. The robe touched the ground with an uncomfortable grunt, covered its eyes with its sleeves, and then dashed away to the other side of the room.

"The shield," urged Tatl. "It doesn't like the sunlight reflecting off the-

The Garo appeared behind her, and snatched her up in the folds of its cloak like an eel swallowing a fish.

"Tatl!" he screamed.

She was gone. For an instant, she was there, but now she was gone. The sky crashed down on his head and sent the room spinning.

 _Gone._

The Garo rushed him again with another deep, unsettling laugh, and blades poised like pincers aimed for its victim's neck. He watched it come, exposed.

Suddenly, a bright flash of light erupted from beneath the Garo's purple robe and sent it into convulsions. It dropped to the ground as harmless cloth, and Tatl vaulted from the openings of the loose folds between the robe's collar and the mask. Her face was ghostly pale.

"Tatl!" he called, and ran between her and the pile of limp purple clothing.

"St-stupid thing," she said. "You weren't, weren't expecting that, were you?" She gave a weak, skitterning laugh. "Thought you could, could, could sc-scare me?! Huh?!"

The pinhole eyes in the golden faceplate of the Garo's mask stared up at the ceiling and through the sky to something far, far away.

He pulled out his sword and poised it over the right eyehole.

"Though my rival, you were spectacular," admitted the robe.

Tatl shrieked and again hid inside her companion's hat.

"You're _damn_ right!" she added, belatedly.

The Garo chuckled. "Have no fear. My fight is over, and you have bested me. I shall open my heart and reveal my wisdom, but first with my own question. Why have you come to this empty place, wearing that mask, of all things?"

"I've come to right the wrong done to this land and seal away the evil power released from within the temple doors," he said.

The Garo chuckled, and then laughed, and then stirred the wind into a vibrating howl as it cackled.

"You have been mislead," it said, "if you think you can stop what has already begun. Majora is long gone from this place. That traitor, he took the mask from this place and left us to this cursed fate a long, long time ago."

He followed the Garo's gaze up, towards the ceiling, and into the sky. Instead of the bright and shining sun, he saw sand waving in whorls like dirt in a bowl of water. Instead of the blue and open sky, he saw the way to parched ground far below the Stone Tower's summit. The only sun was the red emblem painted beneath his feet.

"Majora's Mask?" Tatl asked. "It came from here?"

"It doesn't matter where it came from anymore," said the Garo. "I greedily and naively complied in its release, and when I realized what it was, my resistance proved too late and too little. Releasing this place of the darkness buried in its chest may lay my soldiers and Ikana to rest, but that is merely the cure of a symptom, not the sickness."

"We've seen," he said. "The moon will consume the four worlds in two days."

The Garo fell despondently silent. Then, a spark of hissing, white-hot light ignited its mask.

He and Tatl jumped back from the fire, and hurried to the outer edges of the room.

"W-wait!" hollered Tatl. "You haven't told us anything! How do we-?"

The Garo's voice boomed from its mask. "If you still seek the heart of this place, arm yourself with sunlight, and let it pierce the back of the Temple's throat. Breathe into the Giant the light of order. Raise to the Giant the dawn of life, and accept the burden of the sky they place upon you."

The spark eating its robe grew to a flame, and then to a yellow-white beacon. He pulled Tatl to himself and huddled behind the Mirror Shield.

"To die without leaving a corpse," said the robe, as the light dissolving its remains shimmered and grew blinding white arms that covered the room. "That is the way of us Garo!"

Then, the light subsided, and scattered in its place was a mess of glowing, white-bright shards of light. The room's painted doors opened; one the way he came, and the other through the mouth of the horned demon looking over the temple's front courtyard.

He and Tatl peeked over the edge of his shield and peered around the room for any other danger.

"Is that it?" she asked.

"I think so," he said.

"The temple doesn't feel any different."

"No." He turned towards her. "Were you expecting it to?"

Tatl fluttered to the Garo's glowing debris.

"Arrows," she said, squinting at their light. "For all their advancements, Ikana treasured the arrow enough to leave it in their temples." She prodded at one and and yelped as sudden beams erupted from its point and sent her shrivelling against the floor.

"Careful," he said, kicking the arrow away from her by the shaft before gingerly wrapping it up in the green fabric of his hat. "Light magic can be more destructive than any other kind, if you aren't careful." He frowned. "Don't you know that? You're made of it!"

"And you're a cursed little man-brat, but somehow you're the expert," she said.

What he knew that she didn't: When the curse placed upon Hyrule spread curtains of eternal darkness over the land, it was the arrow that pierced it, not the sword. The arrow represented the sunbeams, the rain, the hail, and fiery plumes falling from the sky at the dead of night. The arrow was the might of the heavens made physical.

He came into the Temple with a mirror like a frightened silver moon and found within it the light of the sun; an arrow reclaimed from the stomach of the Tower made from the hands of man, a Tower made from earth and stone.

The dead begged him to wield it, and now shadows run from him and follow him both. With it, he could illuminate any face he wants to. He should not fear death. He should not chase death, because he _is_ death.

He wears many faces and claims more, because the dead gave him their old faces when they did not need them anymore.

"Come on," he said, gathering the rest of the arrows into his hat and pointing to the entrance. "I want to be done with this place as soon as possible."

Tat nodded, and led the way outside to where the huge, blood-red jewel hung above the Stone Tower Temple's throat. He loaded his bow with careful fingers, and pulled back on the string until light radiated from the arrowhead like a supernova sitting in front of his face. He closed his eyes and did his best to remember the distance from himself to his target, and fired.

Light washed over the Giant's face and illuminated the many facets submerged beneath the curved surface of the gem, and though the effect was blinding, nothing happened.

And then the world beneath his feet turned upside-down, and he flew headfirst into the wide sky while the Temple's stone hand pointed the way.

He screamed,

and thought about

how

when midnight comes on the final day of the lunar year,

the people file up the stone tower in the middle of Clock Town and

across the wooden bridge into the mouth of the tower,

masks on their faces,

and dance together in circles on the inverted clock face beneath the light of the moon, hands pointing up.

Some love, some grieve, some hate, some live, some die, and some remember, all in different points in time, the same for every generation. Their real faces don't matter. Each man, woman, and child is a moment in time that runs into the next, cycling into a giant, never-ending spiral leading higher and higher and higher. To join the Tower is to cleave yourself in two and leave your body behind in the earth when it dies.

These things never change, no matter what generation they come from. The moon watches over them always, could someday crush them, could crush them this or any day of the year and they know that, but that night when the moon is closest and brightest in the sky like a ball of fire is when they turn the world in another direction as one with the giant clock face and look the inevitability of their fate straight in the eye. On the night of the new year when they are at their weakest and most afraid, they stand in the place of the Four Giants and hold up the sky at the highest point of the town.

Majora waits in and on the moon, waits for someone to fall through the sky, waits for something to eat.


	30. Twinmold's Mask

Mist. He awoke to mist. Where the air had been dusty and arid, it was suddenly moist and heavy. The light arrows and his bow spread out around him like a fragmented halo given form by the thick, cloudy air lapping up their light. His fingers clenched around the fabric of his hat, and he shook the drowsiness from his skull.

"Tatl?" he called, dumbfounded.

She floated, focused, on a point above his head and just in front of him. Her light buzzed silently as it reflected off the water in the swirling mist. He gathered up his arrows and looked for the face of the stone Giant, or the perimeter of the Stone Tower, or anything else in the wet, white fog.

A sudden, dull roar from somewhere sucked the miasma away, and he found himself staring into the Giant's gaping mouth.

The Giant's mouth hung open and its hand pointed, same as before, except its eyes looked to the ground, not the sky, and its finger accentuated the earth instead of the heavens. His feet graced the bottom of one of the remaining man-shaped platforms hovering in front of the Giant's face. He stood on top of the Triforce sandwiched between his legs. Behind him, Darmani, Mikau, and his doppelgänger hung like stalactites from another carved man's flat-capped, rectangular head.

"We're upside-down?"

"Hm," said Tatl.

He looked at the Giant again, at the pattern of weathering of its paint and which arm it extended.

"We're not just upside down, we've flipped. Like we're in a mirror. You see?"

"Hm," Tatl said, again.

He peered over the side of the stone platform and into the abyss. Mist. He looked the other way. Mist. A disquietingly quiet chill replaced the undeterred heat of the sun, and neither it nor the moon made an appearance in the sky. The air was perpetually twilight, or dawn.

"There's nowhere to go but inside," he reasoned.

"It's wrong," she said.

"Hm?"

"This place. It feels wrong."

He nodded. If it didn't, the two of them probably wouldn't be there.

He glanced over the edge of the platform again, at the tunnel of fogged eternity. It reminded him of a deep and unending well waiting to swallow him up in nightmares and bloody things unknown and unseen.

It occurred to him that, before it was a tower extending into forever, the original Stone Tower's foundation was probably a deep, man made reservoir, and the ensuing Tower extending from its ceiling cast a shadow of time over the whole canyon whenever the sun rose high in the sky. He took in the distance between himself and the elusive ground and wondered how anyone without the favor of time and an obedient army could ever climb down from this place.

Stone Tower: water table, fortress, sundial, altar, prison.

"Hey, Tatl?"

Her wings fluttered. "Hm?"

"Stay close to me," he said, and crept over the platform and inside the Giant's upside-down mouth.

She followed him without a word over the Giant's painted upper jaw, and then lead the way through the pools of omnipresent fog obscuring each step of the mirrored walkways criss-crossing over the temple ceiling. Every inch forward required care and courage, lest he lose his balance and fall through to nowhere.

Beneath the absolute light of the sun and moon, the Stone Tower Temple's entry chamber haunted its few visitors with total silence and unnerving vacancy. Under cover of the middling glow of nothingness and a hazy, chilly veneer, it imparted a horrific, dreadful, inescapable foreboding.

Tatl paused at a broad intersection of the suspended paths, and chimed.

" _This is a trap,"_ she said.

A dull, roaring wind sucked the mist through the many holes in the floor to reveal the one-eyed demon staring down at them from the center of the room. From this angle, the pillars securing it to the floor appeared as twin horns emerging from a twice-domed crown, and the crest of spikes jutting from the sculpture's then-forehead-now-jaw completed the horned mane encircling the cracked face.

He looked down. The carved platform beneath his feet wore the same mask.

"Majora," he said.

Suddenly, dozens of yellow eyes opened and cut through the hazy air like hateful beacons. Their bodies followed, and soon the remaining fog released an army of angry shapes and shadows upon its prey. They gained ground over all branching paths and sides of the narrow walkways and closed in on their stranded prey.

Tatl screamed and hid in his hat. He drew his bow and loaded it with an arrow of light.

The creatures cowered in the wake of the ensuing corona radiating from his hands, and fled as he fired it into the heart of their dark silhouettes. Showers of light scattered across the walkways and burned away the mist in harsh, pervasive flashes as he fired his arrows one by one into the temple. The Mirror Shield on his back grimaced in agony as it reflected the lingering sparks and shot them across the room in unpredictable, blinding patterns and exposed the army in the mist for what it was: writhing shadows surfacing from the undersides of the temple walkways like snakes from a nest; swarming, flickering figures painted in the murals on the walls like a sea of swarming, furious ants; moving metal statues of horned bull-men with sword and shield clasped in their engraved hands like pawns crafted for war.

He fired until the shadows evaporated, the paintings froze in place, and the living statues became dead metal as the light infected their surfaces. The same jeweled, red-sun crest as the one lodged inside the Giant's throat extinguished on their chests like fires smothering beneath the oppressively heavy, clouded air. Majora's statue watched, silent, as its servants fell to the harsh splashes of light running down the walls and across the curved planes of the great horned mask.

The last bolt of light faded, and the only remaining mist swirled in ragged tatters at the corners of the room.

The Stone Tower was still.

"It's over," he said.

Tatl sobbed.

"This place," she said. "Can you not feel it?! We shouldn't be here. Nobody should be here! Man never should have touched a place like this- a place neither sacred nor mundane. It's an abomination. It shouldn't exist."

Primordial mysteries surrounded the world on all sides, and squeezed into the liminal spaces between the known and the seen. They existed as a nothing- a place of mist, but no river, without light, but also without darkness- until the will of something powerful, obsessed, and trapped gave it form, and gave it law. The Goddesses created a land of light and settled it on a foundation of three; the Giants shared among the four known worlds of Termina one sun, one moon, and the universal flow of the Clock Tower. Majora, captive behind a mirrored veil, had none, but coveted it, and reached out a malevolent hand to take hold of the overtures Ikana offered the sky.

That man, that thief. His soul howled for revenge in a prison with nothing but his own rage and hate to reflect, and nothing to save him from it. His was a world to craft in his own image, and his was an impregnable fortress to build armies until the time was right to tear down the wall and consume everything around him. That man wanted power- _absolute_ power- and he and Zelda gave it to him. He need only wait, like Majora, and someday, someone would turn the key to his door and release him unto the world as a stronger, crueler, hungrier calamity. They damned him to a miserable cycle that not even death could free him.

"I've made a terrible mistake," he said, suddenly full of a resentment and regret he thought might bury itself if he never thought about it again.

Tatl shook her head. "This isn't your doing. This was put in place long before you and I got here. We can't undo what's already been done." She rubbed her arms. "We can only make the best of it."

He put away his bow and pointed to the doorway at the center of Majora's mouth- another one; one that sat on the underside of the walkway to the door above it.

"It's in there," he said. "Whatever else the darkness created in here, I don't know, but whatever parasite is eating away at Ikana's corpse lives through the tunnel of miasma gathered at the ceiling of that room, where the Garo fell."

Tatl nodded, and lead the way across the walkway, across the gloam, and to the door where the Twinmold dwelled in a godless, desolate desert left where something full of water and life once flourished long ago.

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

The Eastern Giant- the real one, the one released when the Twinmold shed their skin for the last time and left their deathbringer empty shells of their giant heads, the one whos song of forgiveness and freedom rattled the ground along with the pull of the third day moon- set him and Tatl down at the Stone Tower's entrance in a world turned right again.

"Forgive," echoed Tatl, as the Giant faded into the silhouette of the Stone Tower at their back. "Forgive… friend." She chimed. "What friend?"

Her companion bit his cheek and looked away, towards Ikana Castle and the rest of the canyon. The blue Music Box house played its happy tune softly from its gleaming horns as the water wheel powering its gears came back to life from the now-flowing waters of the shallow river emerging out of the long-dry spring in the cave at the top of the canyon. The looming moon glowered at it with furious disapproval.

"Forgiveness," said the wind.

They turned around. In front of the Stone Tower's entrance was the red-eyed, violet-cloaked gatekeeper who perched on the edge of the canyon and permitted entry only to those unafraid of the dead. His bare, ashen feet kicked up dust with every step he took.

"Hello," he said to the gatekeeper. "With luck, we've put you out of business. Have we?"

Ikana's dry and barren soil would not heal in a day. In fact, it may remain a naked scar across Termina's landscape for millennia, but so long as the curse of death no longer plagued its soil, its future held hope, and the river could again nourish new life.

The gatekeeper's dry, crooked laugh bubbled from the depths of his violet cloak. "My associate in the Tower must have been surprised to see you wearing my mask. I would hope his grudge didn't overshadow his better judgement."

Tatl blinked. "Huh?"

He uncovered the gold-crested Garo mask from his collection. "Would you like it back?"

"Huh?!" repeated Tatl. "You?! But we took it from those two idiot twins at the ranch! You mean that it's-?"

The Garo cackled. "You thought it was a coincidence that I told you exactly where to find it?"

Tatl's eyes widened, and she chimed. "That wasn't this cycle. How did you know that we-?"

"And you just admitted to me that I am the one who told you. Yee-hee-hee!" The Garo stirred up the dry earth with the bottom of his gnarled, wooden staff in a fit of glee.

"Did you take Majora from the Stone Tower?" he asked.

The Garo stopped giggling. his face was only a shadow beneath its purple hood, but his red eyes tilted as he turned his head sideways and giggled again.

"The war ended in an instant," he said. "The demon blanketed the land in a curtain of dust and desolation the instant the seal upon its power was broken. Misfortune flew from the Stone Tower's doors in a thick wave of darkness, and suddenly, everyone, both of the Garo and Ikana, was cursed dead. But not me, yee-hee-hee. I was killed before that happened. An impostor coveted my mask, and the mask of the demon."

He chuckled, subdued, and then frowned, even in the shadows.

"To die without leaving a corpse." His ashen hands tightened around his staff, and his bent back trembled beneath the weight of regret. "I am a disgrace to the way of the Garo. Die I never shall, not until the wrongs of my great disgrace were righted, and so neither will my body rot until that day."

He looked to his saviors, and giggled as his body slowly faded into thin air. "That day has come. The other spirits in this canyon tricked by the false promise of power and prosperity have finally been laid to rest."

He was gone. A gust of wind spread from where he stood not a moment before, and sighed.

"Thank you," he said.

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

Author's note: two more chapters, everyone! thank you so much for reading, and for reviewing to give me that last push!


	31. Couple's Mask

For the first time in an unspeakable amount of years, the sun's setting, red rays bathed the canyon in pearlescent pinks and warm oranges instead of the foreboding, crimson stain of sins long past, but forever felt. Instead of a wall of bloody light, a waterfall splashed down the side of Ikana Hill and refracted the sunset in fragmented rainbows and trails of gold. The only shadow tracing the canyon wall was that of a boy, and at his heels was Tatl reflecting yellow-white light off the water-smoothed curves of the rock around her. The river, thick and free-flowing, hurried alongside them from the bottom of the canyon.

Above it, the moon glowered covetously. The pronounced, unignorable tremors shaking the ground undermined the canyon's newfound purity like a splatter of black ink over an otherwise pristine blouse, and brought both the boy and the fairy to a rattling halt before a pile of limestone ruins loitering in the pocket of the ridge's sudden dead end. The river beside them disappeared underground for cover.

"Are you sure he's going to be here?" Tatl whispered. "We don't know what happens in the three days without our influence, so-"

"He's here," affirmed the boy, panting. "This is the part that we couldn't change. Nothing you or I said or did convinced him not to come here, so there's nowhere else he could be."

"Alright, yes, well, maybe, but what are you going to say in order to convince him that you-?"

Sakon's silhouette appeared as a glowing orange speck at the bottom of the canyon in the sunset's light, from the opposite direction of his witnesses' approach. Over his shoulder was an empty bag, and though neither of them could see it, on his face was surely a wide, insincere smile.

Tatl stuffed herself inside her companion's hat as he disappeared behind the Stone Mask's uneven veneer. Together, they crept to the other side of the ruins.

Kafei crouched low on the other side. His expression was a mystery beneath his yellow fox mask, but the object of his attention was not, even as the sun completely disappeared into the west and the tremors of the earth heralded tonight as the final night. Every so often, he poked his head up from between the cracks in the ruins and pored over the lower canyon for signs of Sakon's progres, oblivious to the figure in green hat and green clothes approaching from the direction of Ikana Hill. His balled fists whitened from the fervor of his grip, and canyon dirt soiled the deep purples and crisp whites of his clothing. Only the gemstone pendant hanging from his neck remained unscathed.

How Kafei could remain so single-mindedly absorbed with the fate of his wedding mask when the moon above was surely falling, his voyeur in the rocks couldn't say, but then again, that was the charm and fate of most creatures in the world. Theirs was a lifetime of moments small and insignificant, but each with a vastness of meaning to their individual owners that made the workings of the clock unimportant by comparison. Very few slid between the cogs and gears turning out eternity to keep the world ticking. Very few were the gods in the machine.

Sakon's long legs carried him like a prancing spider up the path and to the canyon wall, and his pale fingers skittered over its surface for something too small to see. Whatever it was, he found it, and it sent a section of the stone wall retreating into itself until a hole three times as tall as Sakon and eight times as wide revealed itself to the open air.

Kafei crept to the edge of the ruins on bended knees. He barely breathed.

The thief disappeared inside the cave, and then, after a tense, hesitant trepidation, so did Kafei- and so did Tatl, tucked away in the hat of a tagalong as unassuming and unremarkable as stone.

The cave was older than its inhabitants, and clearly manmade. Painted carvings- freshly restored- in the walls depicted heroes from Ikana dressed in many-colored masks openly staring at the intruders with black eyes. The floor, while riddled with imperfections and holes, was suspiciously flat, and the mechanisms running around the perimeter of the stone door used a mishmash of gears both new and unspeakably old. When Sakon pressed another button somewhere in the wall, they squealed and turned until the door closed again behind him and his intruders, who ducked behind a broken pillar at the entrance. Sakon paused and turned around for a long, pensive moment before disappearing behind one of the two painted stone doors on the left and right of the room.

Kafei's mask emerged from behind the pillar, and panned the room.

An assortment of urns and jars leaned against the walls. Their glazes and patterns showed no consensus of time or placement. A handful of the oldest and most elegant glinted with the iridescent teal-and-red of Ikana, but several displayed the raw slip of the southern swamp or the white kaolin and blue-tile mosaic of the ocean, and a few of the more massive jars were carved from a single piece of quartz from the northern mountains. Next to them was a low, worn wooden table with cans of paint and vials of varnish stacked on top of it and scattered around it. An ancient mosaic held together in a new wooden frame sat at the center of the table. At one point, it had been pieces, but Sakon had puzzled it back together to its former glory. A handful of other lovingly restored antiques loitered in the far opposite corner: armor, murals, masks, a sculpture in the shape of the crest of Ikana's royal family.

Selling them was out of the question, of course. Tonight, Sakon sold the bombs he stole from the old woman in Clock Town instead. He'd robbed the old woman because he hadn't exploded, and he hadn't exploded because nobody had waited in the shadows with the intent to fire at will.

Kafei crept forward on soft toes, and then froze. On the far wall came a glint of gold from the alcove sitting in the center: the Sun's Mask. Its two hollow eyes stared mournfully at the mouth of the cave from the center of an intricately embossed brass face framed by a mane of golden rays. It mourned like a dawn never to come; like the sun of a fourth day never to rise from the east and meet the moon in the sky again. Its last look at her was of a face contorted in pain and fury, doomed to destruction, but unable to look away from it.

Kafei rushed towards the Sun's Mask with open arms, and tripped on nothing. Suddenly, a distant alarm bell sounded out a raucous clatter at the same instant that a weighted net pinned him from above.

"No!" cried Kafei, struggling beneath the net. " _No!_ "

Then, a panel in the wall behind the Sun's Mask flipped open and sent the mask tumbling down a dark hole. Tatl raced after it in a frantic arc of streaking light. Her companion hurried to the alcove after her, and cursed violently when the hole slid closed and swallowed her up.

"Who is that?!" Kafei demanded, his mask half-on and half-off his face as he whipped his head from side to side in search of the source of the sudden voice in the room. "Sakon?!"

He unsheathed his sword with a clean hiss and sawed the net's rough, tangled rope.

"Who are you?!" Kafei writhed beneath the net. "Where are you?! My mask! My mask! Give it back, thief!"

"I don't have your mask!"

The net gave under his blade, and he yanked Kafei free from its clutches.

"Go through the door Sakon went," he said, pointing imperceptibly.

"Why should I listen to you?!"

He shoved Kafei away and ran for the other door.

"I don't have time for your nonsense! Just do it!" he said, and threw open the door.

Cool darkness greeted him.

"Tatl!" he cried. "Tatl! Can you hear me?! Tatl!"

His voice echoed into the void. If he listened closely, he could hear water percolating in the distance.

"Wonderful," he grumbled, and lit one of his magic arrowheads with flame to illuminate the room.

The rock here was smooth and dry from centuries of drought, but once, Sakon's hideout was a waterway. An empty trough in the stone unfolded into the distant darkness, flanked by a set of raised pathways carved with eroding shapes of waves rippling in the direction of the absent water's flow until it abruptly ended at the base of a hastily-made barricade of wood, plaster, and rubble not far from the door. A spectrum of charms and purification tags smothered its surface and the connecting walls, and carved into the plaster beneath them was a single word: Beware.

If he hadn't just broken the curse on Ikana, he might have masqueraded as Captain Keeta or another member of the undead and gained their assistance in exchange for a few small tokens. Why must he have brought justice to Ikana today, of all days?!

"Tatl, if you can hear me, I need you to say something!" he called. "Tatl! Ta-!"

A sudden force knocked into his back. He crashed down the short triplet of stone stairs leading from the doorway to the walkway, and then to the ground. The door slammed shut, and the fire arrow billowed with a huge plume of flame as it hit stone to reveal Kafei wrapped around his torso before snuffing out with a hiss.

"I told you to go the other way!" he said, fumbling in the darkness for Kafei's arms and roughly pushing them away.

Kafei held fast. "And let you lead me into a trap?!" he said. You're a curse of this canyon sent to torment me! You appeared to me as _thin air_! You threw a net on me and took my mask!"

"I _released_ you from the net, and a hole in the wall took your mask!"

"Liar!" Kafei's hands fought for the handle of the sword strapped upon his back. It slid from its sheath with a strangled hiss of metal on metal, and clumsily bit into its owner's neck as Kafei struggled to claim it.

"Undead wretch!" he cried. "Give back what's mine!"

He knocked Kafei off with his elbow and rolled away. When he found his feet, his bow came not long after, and he loaded it with one of the last few magical arrows in his quiver.

Light exploded from the arrowhead in a blinding flash and ran harsh, greedy palms over the dark stone until the passage's shadows were indistinguishable from daylight. Kafei's shocked cry echoed through the stone as the contrast seeded tendriled blooms of white and pale green over his vision like mold over old bread. Only when his eyes adjusted and beat back the blight did he see Kafei huddled at his feet with arms thrown over his face. The gilded sword lay uselessly on the ground by his side, reflecting light like a mirror.

He trained the arrowhead on Kafei.

"Look at me," he said.

The earth rumbled, and the stone cavern around them trembled.

Kafei hesitated, and then lowered his arms from his squinted eyes. Blood trickled down from a gash on his forehead, and already one of his eyes swelled from an absent strike thrust in the darkness. His face was pale, and his breaths came in ragged puffs. His nails split in places, and half-moons of dirt and grime infected the rest. Climbing the canyon was beyond the strength of most adult men, let alone a child, and the continued exertion took its toll.

How many times had he been in Kafei's position? How many times had he been exhausted, trapped, and hurt? How many times had he ground himself into the dirt over a trivial quest that he convinced himself meant something? Obsessive, thick-headed, and cursed: the two of them were hardly any different, just as Tatl said, and he knew it. Kafei left Anju to wait for something he convinced himself was important, the same way he left Saria to wait while he invited disaster into her life- the same way he left Ruto, Nabooru, Impa, Darunia, Zelda. He couldn't stand Kafei because he couldn't stand himself.

Pity for Kafei replaced the exasperated disgust rampant in his heart.

"You don't have a face," said Kafei. "I can see your arms and legs- I can see that you're there in the light, but I can't see your face," he said. "Are you a ghost?

"It's my mask," he admitted. "It's fighting with the magic in the arrow. But that isn't important." He kicked the sword away from Kafei. "My friend. A fairy. She flew after your mask when it fell. I have to find her."

"Why are you here?"

"Anju sent me," he said.

Kafei's eyes flashed, and he grit his teeth. The gemstones in his amber and amethyst pendant deflected the light in merciless fragments, and his hand crawled towards the far-flung gilded sword. "How do you know about her? How do you know about me?"

A boot appeared in the light and squashed Kafei's hand flat against the ground. The bright arrowhead stared right into his eyes and forced them shut as he shrank against the ground in morbid expectation.

"We don't have a lot of time," his captor said. "We can do one of two things- I can kill you in cold blood and look for my friend, or you and I can work together and both get what we want. Do we have a deal?"

When Kafei actually took a moment to consider it, his sympathy evaporated and the urge to release the arrow right between Kafei's eyes suddenly became that much more attractive. Each second he wasted was another second Tatl spent trapped in a place increasingly far away. They beat on his nerves like hurled stones, and pounded in his ears with the sound of his heart.

"You have a deal," Kafei said, before his accoster's patience wore out.

"Thank you."

He moved the point of his arrow safely away from Kafei's person, and then away from the bowstring. Its glow dimmed, but did not extinguish even as he replaced it in the quiver. He gathered his sword and pulled Kafei to his feet before dragging him to the second doorway of the main cave and throwing it open. Water sang in the distance.

Unlike the other corridor, a series of small, lit lamps hanging from the walls held off the darkness. The passageway was uneven and damaged from age, like its twin, but housed a thoroughfare made from a series of thick, wide, generous stairs downwards in lieu of a waterway. Flowers and vines appeared alongside the patterns of waves and whorls in the floor and walls. They were worn and scarred from age and the slow shifting of the earth over hundreds of years, but the most harrowing defacement came from the unseen wires spread across the passageway at random.

Upon tripping the first one, Kafei found himself face to face with a hail of rubble from the ceiling. His companion threw the Mirror Shield over their heads as they waded through, and stepped directly across another wire in their haste to escape. Kafei cursed as he felt it give, and an instant later, a net disguised in the floor closed around the two of them and pulled them into the air. They struggled against one another in a frantic tangle of limbs.

All the while, Tatl was—!

He tore the Stone Mask from his face with a decided roar, and after several agonizing seconds of navigating through his bag in extreme confinement, replaced it with Darmani's face. Kafei no sooner let out a cry of surprise than his companion's size and weight ballooned, and the net tore from the ceiling and sent them crashing to the ground below.

It shook on impact. Kafei groaned.

Darmani's arms and legs curled into his body until he was a perfect, dense ball, and he rolled himself deeper into the passageway with a single minded fury. The spikes on his hide sent sparks skittering over the stairs as he tore down them. Rocks, ropes, and oil splashed over his body as he broke through trap after trap, and Darmani endured with gritted teeth until the ground fell away from underneath him and sent him plummeting to the bottom of a hole.

His body unrolled on contact with the ground, and his arms and legs splattered over the cool earth. The world spun around his head, and shook beneath his supine body. He felt like a goldfish trapped in a sack: useless, helpless, and fragile inside a fragile, temporary world.

And what good was he?! His steadfast companion, his friend, _his fairy_ was in danger and he was too deep in the bottom of a hole to do anything!

Staccatoed footsteps echoed down the passageway until a shadow appeared over the lip of the hole. Darmani squinted, and it became Kafei.

"Tatl," he said. "Where is Tatl? Do you see her? Do you see Sakon?"

"No, but," Kafei looked around, "you've destroyed most of the traps, I think. I can throw one of the nets down to you to climb up, but can you become something smaller and lighter than a Goron?"

"Yes," Darmani called, belatedly, cradling his head and searching for the right mask.

He found it, and switched faces. His body shrank in an agonizing process of twisting and melting, and instead of a Goron, a Deku child sat in the bottom of the hole.

Kafei tossed a net into the hole. The latticed loops created a stepladder, and the Deku child hurried up it with clumsy, frail arms and oversized feet.

"Thank you," he said, cresting the top.

Kafei grabbed his arm and lead him around the hole.

"There's no time for that!" he said, and rushed deeper into the passageway.

In his free hand, he held a long splinter of wood from the remains of whatever obstacles Darmani demolished, and held it in front of them like dowsing rod as he cut through the air in search of more hidden wires.

The two of them hurried down the stairs at a steady clip despite the rubble and trouble activating in front of them at staggered intervals, and the anxious, violent tremors rattling the earth. The air cooled, the sound of water crescendoed with each step, and soon, images of spiders crawled over the lushly carved flowers, followed by dragonflies, snappers, and palm fronds until nothing of the earlier valley's flora remained. Then, at the bottom of one final, shallow stair, the ceiling and walls opened around them to reveal the remains of an underground wharf carved into the rock. The river dashed through the center with unbridled impatience, and extending from its fortified shore was a recently-constructed wooden landing set atop a series of floats held together and to the wharf with ropes. An oblong, wooden canoe with a lantern hanging from each curved end and a mishmash of sacks encased inside the hull bobbed in front of it. Sakon hunched over its side, untying the tethers.

"Thief!" Kafei cried, and bolted to the boat with the splinter raised over his shoulder like a weapon.

Sakon frantically undid the last tether and pushed off. Kafei hurled his splinter at Sakon like a spear, and then flung himself from the landing and onto the side of the canoe. Sakon dodged the splinter, but fell on his rear as the vessel shook and bobbed in the water from the oncoming force of Kafei's body. He scrambled back to his feet, knife in hand and frantic smile on his face.

On the stone wharf, Darmani replaced the Deku child and fired a spring-loaded metal hook from a device in his massive hand into the side of Sakon's canoe. The hook tore through the wood and held, and when Darmani fat-fingered his thumb over the button activating the reeling mechanism of the hookshot, it deferred to Darmani's exceptional weight and slowly pulled the boat towards him with a violent, prolonged grinding; then, it jammed, still unspooled. Darmani traded the hookshot handle for the remaining chain and pulled the boat hand-over-hand towards the shore. Spray sprang from the water's surface as the boat's path contested the direction of the river's flow and encroached upon the wooden landing at frightening speed, and Sakon and Kafei both struggled to keep themselves from falling into the river along with the precariously rattling cargo.

"The fairy!" Darmani roared. His deep voice beat an echo through the cavern, and he reeled the canoe closer to the landing with another impassioned pull.

Kafei's legs frantically fumbled to reclaim the landing as footing while Sakon vainly pulled at the hookshot embedded in the back of his boat.

"Give us the fairy!" repeated Darmani.

"And the Sun's Mask!" added Kafei. "Where are they?!"

Sakon's surprised eyes narrowed, and his frightened grin turned into a snarling frown.

"That mask is a treasure beyond monetary value! I'll never give it to you!"

Kafei's foot found the surface of the landing, and bridged it and the boat with his short body. "That mask is my wedding mask! What value could it possibly have to you?!"

Sakon swiped at Kafei with his knife. "You ingrate! Don't you know your family line?! Don't you know where the gold around it came from, how _old_ the mask at its center is?!"

A muffled chime rang out from somewhere in the boat.

"Tatl!" Darmani cried.

He pulled the canoe until the back half of it crested the landing, and then fell on its side with a clattering splash. Kafei's lower half fell into the water, but found the edge of the landing as the canoe's weight forced it under the water. The twin lanterns on the bow and stern swung violently while Sakon and the cargo inside lurched towards the rushing river.

" _Where is Tatl?!_ "

"Stop!" called Kafei, clamping his hands down over the side of the canoe to keep it steady. "Don't let the-!"

Suddenly, a violent tremor seized the earth. Darmani's hands held fast to the hookshot and his feet planted securely on the ground, but the boat and floating landing rattled and spilled some of its contents into the river, including a small cotton sack. Sakon wrenched it from the water and pulled it to his chest with one quick swipe.

"My mask!" Kafei accused, and clambered onto the side of the boat towards the thief.

Sakon compressed himself farther inside the overturned canoe's sideways envelope of interior and produced from the bag a glass bottle with a frantic, yellow-white light trapped inside.

Kafei paused.

"Tatl!" screamed Darmani.

She answered with a muffled chime.

Sakon extended his arm and held the bottle above the water's roaring, black surface. The stray flicker of the lantern hanging from the overturned prow cast a foreboding glow on his white linen shirt and pale skin.

Beneath Darmani's mask, his face turned white.

"Let me go, or I drop her," Sakon threatened.

"Give us my mask, too, and we'll let you go," Kafei boasted.

Sakon tore into him with a withering look. "That mask isn't even yours."

Kafei's fist thumped against the boat's body. "It is _my_ wedding mask! I crafted the mantle myself! I produced and applied the gold leaf myself!" He beat the boat again. "The faceplate is a family heirloom!"

"And what did you melt down to make that gold?!" Sakon roared. "Do you know how old that mask's faceplate is?! Where it came from?! Do you even know anything about it?!" He sneered.

"What, was it worth more as a series of antique amulets?!" shouted Kafei. "As an old bracelet?!"

Sakon seethed.

"I'll never let you deface these relics again. You and your family- you would erase every bit of history of the Old Kingdom, if you could. All its glory, all its sins. All of its history, just to suit you. Your mother is so proud of her ancestry, but only when it suits her fashions and social standing!" He sneered. "You all think I'm a thief. Me. But you don't stop to think about why I do what I do, do you?"

"You _are_ a thief!" Kafei cried, advancing over the boat. "You'll never escape!"

"It's not up to you!" Sakon hissed, and dangled Tatl farther over the river with a level, expectant glare towards Darmani.

Kafei hesitated, and then turned around.

How Darmani's face appeared in a moment of hopeless resignation, his impostor knew from glimpses of the Goron's lingering ghost before he finally laid it to rest within the mask. He knew how obviously Darmani's despair appeared in defeat, and he knew that expression stared blankly back at Kafei.

Sakon smiled, wicked and thin.

"I've come so close," Kafei urged. His clenched fists shook on the boat's surface. "Please! You can't give up!"

Darmani shook his broad head. "Don't drop the bottle," he said.

"No," said Kafei, helplessly turning from Darmani to Sakon. His face twisted into a scowl. "No!"

He crawled on top of the boat's upturned side and grabbed at Sakon with a mad, desperate fervor. At the same time, Darmani slammed one massive, heavy foot onto the wooden landing and forced it partially underwater. The buoyant backlash travelled the length of the landing in a dynamic wave that knocked Kafei from his perch and pushed the sideways boat into the river. Sakon held Tatl's bottle between his knees, gripped the yoke, and gritted his teeth as the canoe threatened to capsize on reentry, but Darmani tugged the hookshot line in the opposite direction and righted it. Sakon tilted sideways, soaked, but with Tatl still clutched between his knees and spilling yellow-white light over his torso and face.

Darmani held the end of the hookshot in front of himself and let the river carry the boat to the chain's length. The rumbling earth questioned his and Kafei's balance, but did nothing to stop the canoe.

"How could you?!" screamed Kafei, finding his feet and tearing down the shifting length of the landing.

"Open the bottle and let Tatl go, and I'll release the line!" Darmani called.

Kafei threw himself at the Goron and beat on his thick skin with futile fists.

" _How could you?!"_

The canoe reached the end of the line and idled in a gradual semicircle through the water.

"Open the bottle!" repeated Darmani, forcing Kafei away at arm's length. "Open the bottle, or I'll pull you back in!"

Sakon put his hand on the bottle's cork, and paused. The cavern shook, again, and stray fragments of rock fell from the ceiling and into the water.

"You know," Sakon said, grinning, "this world was damned when the ancients made a mask of power out of something they shouldn't have meddled with."

He pulled the cork, and Tatl flew from the bottle and to the wharf like a firework cutting through the air.

Darmani pressed another button on the hookshot. Its pronged head compressed into itself and slid out of the hole it made in the canoe, and then coiled back into the handle of the hookshot. Kafei dove for it with a desperate scream, but Darmani's firm grasp held him off.

The canoe floated farther and farther from the wharf. Kafei watched with red, despondent eyes.

"Are you satisfied?" Sakon called. The twin lights on his boat became merely pinpricks slowly revolving around one another as the canoe gently spun in the water. His voice echoed in the cavern along with the water's. "Was it worth spending your last hours like this?" he asked, and then finally disappeared.

Kafei fell to his knees. Tatl hovered above him, shivering and hiccuping.

Darmani whirled on her. "What were," he began, with fire and shuddering brimstone in his voice, but then the sight of her pale and harrowed face turned it to a pathetic thickness in his throat.

He wiped his face with his hand. Darmani's mask came with it, and soon his body twisted and shrank to that of a Hylian boy. Hot tears streamed down his cheeks.

"What were you thinking, diving in after the Sun Mask like that?!"

Tatl's trembling body shook off the memory of confinement as she took in several deep gulps of the cavern's cool air.

"I thought, maybe, I could carry it," she said. "I thought…"

"Don't ever put yourself in jeopardy for something as stupid as that again!" he cried. "Not for anyone, but especially not for me! I would never forgive _either_ of us if something happened to you! Do you understand?! You are so much more important than that- than _any_ of this!" he threw his arms out wide- to the cavern, to the canyon, to the whole of the three days too big for his wingspan. "For a mask. For a stupid mask. Tatl, you could have been crushed by a trap, or shunted to the bottom of the river, and for, for what? For that?!" he pointed to Kafei and fought to put his cracking voice back together. "For him?! For a mask?!"

"I didn't want to see you put yourself through this again," admitted Tatl.

He hung his head.

"The failure. The disappointment. You'll never stop trying, but it kills me to watch you endure this over and over again." She rubbed her arms. "From the beginning, it's been you. All of the power, all the responsibility. It all falls on you." She looked at the water. "I thought I could help carry it."

He wept. The sound carried over the river and through the cavern, and when his body shook, the earth shook with it. Tatl glimmered miserably at his shoulder.

When Zelda sealed him in a new past, she sent him to the hour before the thief in black first laid eyes on him through a courtyard window; the hour before he swore false loyalty to her father. Navi had guided him from the forest to meet his destiny, and in the future he saved, her presence quelled the suspicions of the Kokiri children, and guided him back to it. When Navi left him, she left him not as a child recognized as Kokiri, but stranded as an outsider unsuitable for a fairy, and by extension, unworthy of the eternal Kokiri childhood. The Kokiri had no answer to give him as to his name, because they and the Deku Sprout born from their father tree's corpse never answered when he called. When he searched for them, he never found them. The kingdom of Hyrule may have forgotten him in earnest, because they never knew him, but the forest meadow forgot him as a decisive act of ceremony and of grief.

He wanted a family, a friend, a companion. But most of all, he wanted someone who wouldn't leave him behind when he was no longer useful, and who meant nothing to his future once lived. Navi was not that. She never had been that, and even if he found her, or if he didn't and Tatl became his fairy companion, it would never be enough to reclaim his place in Kokiri forest in a way more meaningful than appearances. He had changed too much inside, and was too soiled by the knowledge of the world beyond.

The other children besides Saria had never seen him as Kokiri, anyway, before Navi appeared in his life.

Though it broke his heart to accept it, he realized that perhaps what he sought wasn't Navi at all, but something that he could never recreate.

"You are the greatest fairy anyone could hope for," he said, and cupped his hand beneath Tatl's feet. "If only it could be that simple."

She lighted on his palm, and pressed her forehead to his.

"If only," she agreed. "You are the greatest child I could hope to deserve."

"Don't tear yourself up just because I have," he begged. "Don't bear a weight that isn't yours. Please, just light my way. That's enough."

She shrank into his forehead, nodding.

The earth trembled, and the seconds slipped by like sand through the neck of an hourglass. Kafei watched the two of them with flat, dull eyes and an empty frown.

He broke away from Tatl first.

"Do you still want to see Anju?"

"I don't have the Sun's Mask," Kafei said. "It's just like her mother said. Nobody in my family follows through on anything. We're just full of empty promises. Politicians and social climbers." He stared into the dark water by his feet. "I can't even keep the most basic of promises to my _fiance._ "

"Kafei, the mask was never the most important thing to Anju," said Tatl.

"It wasn't," Kafei admitted. "She loves me as I am, and wouldn't care either way. I have no doubt of that. But her life would be more miserable for it because," he wiped at his face, "because of her mother. Presenting the mask wasn't just about Anju, but crushing whatever shit her mother might say to drive between us." He glanced at his companions. "I can tell you aren't from here. The wedding mask is an incredibly important tradition. It's more than just a token. Its monetary value acts as part of the wife's dowry and the husband's commitment." He sneered. "Appearances. I fell into the most basic of traps, just like the very people I tried to sway. It's always about money and appearances…"

The three of them looked to their melancholic reflections: Tatl's, sallow and shimmering; his, red-faced, snot-nosed, and covered in dirt; and Kafei's, dark, wet, and hopeless. The groaning earth sent them scattering in ripples across the water.

"Your necklace," he said. "I don't know what it means for the two of you, but I know it holds some special sentiment. Whatever promise you need the Sun's Mask to represent, I can't imagine you couldn't use it instead." He squirmed uncomfortably in his skin. "My fiance used a gemstone to propose to me. I don't see why you can't do something similar."

"You have a fiance?" asked Tatl, incredulous.

He nodded uncomfortably. "Had," he mouthed.

Tatl leaned in with exaggerated interest.

Kafei furrowed his brow. "How old are you, anyway? Is that what you really look like without any masks? Are you a child?"

Tatl planted her hands on her hips. "Are _you_ a child?"

Kafei grimaced.

"Do you want to see Anju or not?" Tatl pried. "You don't have much more time to decide."

Kafei wiped beneath his eyes. "How would we get to her? I'm not sure how to open the door to the canyon again, and I don't know how far into the swamp the eastern river leads."

"The base of Woodfall," Tatl and her companion said, in tandem.

Kafei's eyes narrowed. "How would you know that?"

The boy and fairy looked at one another, and then immediately began talking over the other.

"Uh, well, the river was, was curving south, you know, towards the swamp," stuttered Tatl. "So, obviously, the next big, uh, concentration of flowing water is Woodfall, so…"

"The, uh, the, the carvings on the walls are of plants and insects common to the swamp," tried her companion. "Woodfall was just a guess. Um."

The two of them laughed unconvincingly, and then stared at the water in mortified silence.

Kafei sized the two of them up and snorted. "The pair of you are an invisible shapeshifter and a magical fairy. Do you really think I can't tell there's a larger conspiracy going on with you?"

He and Tatl gauged one another, again.

"We know that the river's main current ends in a waterfall at Woodfall's base, but I think this channel empties somewhere less perilous," said Tatl. "At least, I don't think Sakon intends to commit suicide."

Kafei cursed. "If travelling from the canyon, I could reach town before morning, but even if we had a boat, there's not enough time to traverse the whole swamp and Termina field." He shook his head and slammed his fist against the landing. "I'm such a fool."

"Anju isn't in Clock Town. She fled to Romani Ranch with her family." Tatl eyed her companion. "And Cremia."

He scowled and rubbed his temples.

Kafei closed his eyes. "I understand."

"We can still get you there," he said.

"Yeah," Tatl said. "He's got a magic tuba."

" _Ocarina_ , Tatl. For the last time."

"Would she even want to see me like this?" Kafei asked. "As a failure, not as a child. Would it only cause grief with her mother? I don't want to fill her last hours with misery and strife." he bit his lip as the earth shook, again.

"You can't possibly make it any worse than you already have," said Tatl. "Not to kick you while you're down, but it's true."

Kafei turned towards the water.

"Will you please take me to see Anju?" he whispered, after a long, agonizing moment in his own head.

"Of course." The blue ocarina was already in his hand. "But don't ask me to do any explaining."

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

The moon's massive presence smothered the blood-red sky above the ranch with a feral, ravenous glare. Occasional tears of flame and ash fell from its grimacing face and landed somewhere over the cowering Termina below. In half an hour, the moon would swallow them all, but Kafei only needed twenty-nine minutes. He threw open the ranch door and ran up the stairs, panting.

The painted white furniture and lavender-and-pink quilts in the room were the same as every three days, but the house's occupancy had grown: Cremia was sitting on her bed, holding both the vacant-eyed Romani and the tearstained Anju in her arms. Anju's mother sat next to her, holding one of Granny's thin hands. The other squeezed Anju's knee. In her lap was her husband's favorite book, the same one she had read so many stories from over the course of these three days. When Kafei threw open the door, all of them but Romani looked up with frightened, bewildered eyes, and then froze in shocked incomprehension.

Tatl and her companion followed behind Kafei under the guise of the Stone Mask, but Granny's old eyes saw through it.

"Tortus," she cried, stumbling from her wheelchair on trembling, unsteady legs. "Tortus, you've returned!"

Her legs failed her when the earth shuddered beneath her feet, and she fell to the floor. Kafei ran to her side before anyone thought to do anything else, but Granny reached past him and held out her hand.

"Tortus," she said.

Anju's mother hurried after Granny. "Mother, nobody is-!"

He removed the Stone Mask and accepted Granny's outstretched hand. The room gasped, with the exception of Romani, who passively accepted the chaos in front of her.

"Hello, Granny," he said, and nodded to Kafei, who relinquished her. "I don't think we have time for stories today."

"Of course not," she said, throwing her arms around him. "Not when you wait so long to come home!"

Anju's mother stumbled back in shock, and then wilted beneath her green coat. Her knees hit the circular rug with a defeated thud.

"Mother, that isn't Tortus." She squeezed her eyes closed. "That isn't, that isn't my husband." Her lower lip wrinkled beneath her teeth. "That isn't Tortus."

"How can you be so cold?! Haven't I taught you anything?!" Granny's shrill voice rattled through the room. "Spirits without names or faces wander this world without rest or belonging- from Ikana and tragedies even older. We give them a place to rest by giving them names, by giving them faces, by letting them belong, even if only temporarily. Don't you understand?" She sniffed into his shoulder. "This spirit has accepted, and so he is Tortus! Will you really turn him away, even as the world is ending?!"

A lump formed in his throat. He clung to Granny's shawl and let himself be humbled in this moment by her kindness. They had not spoken once in these three days, and yet Granny opened her heart to him immediately. His real name danced on the tip of his tongue; a secret barely contained.

But this moment was not about him.

Cremia looked between him and Kafei with confused blue eyes, oblivious to how terrifying she was.

"I've never seen either of these children before," Cremia whispered to Anju.

(He collapsed in a heap of relief into Granny's shoulder. Time may not wipe away his memory, but cleansing hers was a blessing greater than he could have asked for.)

"It's Kafei," said Anju, immediately, rising from the bed to kneel in front of him.

Cremia shook her head and shifted closer to her best friend. "But Anju, this is a _child_. You can't impose this kind of thing on a-!"

"Hello, Cremia," said Kafei, smiling. "I'm sorry you were involved in all of this, after all. You have enough troubles with the ranch as it is. I'm sure my mother must have given you a lot of trouble, too. I'd hoped my cutting off contact would spare you, but I was wrong. Please forgive me."

Cremia's jaw dropped. She reached for Anju's hand, somewhere between excitement and disbelief.

From her place on the floor, Anju's mother snarled. "You'll apologize to Cremia, but not Anju?! Not my daughter?!"

"Let him _finish_ ," Granny scolded.

"I should apologize to you, too," admitted Kafei to Anju's family. "My disappearance cannot have been easy to accept, especially not on Anju's behalf."

Then, Kafei removed the pendant from his neck and turned to his fiance.

"Anju," he said. "I have failed you in every possible way. I have failed to uphold the traditions of old; I have failed to present you with the Sun's Mask on the morning of our wedding, and I have failed to shield you from grief and uncertainty. I don't have a satisfactory explanation for my actions, because I realize now that there is nothing in this world that could possibly be more important than dedicating myself to your wellbeing of mind, body, and heart."

Anju's thin, pale hands covered her mouth, and steady tears fell from her eyes. The moon shook the earth below her.

"I didn't, I, I, I don't have the Moon's Mask with me," she said, caught between a laugh and a cry. "I don't have mine! I didn't wait! I didn't wait for you!" She wiped at her eyes. "Kafei, I'm so sorry."

He shook his head. "I never should have asked you to wait so long. Not like this. I should have been here for you, Anju."

He bent down on one knee and presented her with the pendant.

"I know this isn't much, but this is all I have to offer you. If you don't want to accept, I understand, but it would be wrong of me to let the world end without telling you that I want to live my last moments by your side. There is nowhere else I would rather be right now than here, with you." He smiled. "Please, forgive me, and please accept me as-!"

Anju threw her arms around him and pulled him to her.

"Of course," she said.

The two of them held one another for ten seconds, twenty seconds, a minute, two, three, five. They didn't move, even as the lamps in the ceiling trembled and the red light outside swelled into the room's circular window and over the floor.

Then, Anju's mother cleared her throat.

They turned around.

Her body blocked out a dark shape in the oncoming moon's light, and in her lap glimmered the opalescent Moon's Mask. The grim smile across her face was barely visible as she turned the mask around in her hands.

"I'd like to apologize for my harshness," she said. "To all of you. I can see that you have been through a lot."

" _We_ have been through a lot," Kafei clarified, expanding the sentiment to Anju's mother.

"I don't think anyone here has it in them to be angry with anyone anymore," said Cremia, with a glance to Anju.

Anju's mother smiled, and looked from the mask to her daughter. "I couldn't leave it behind. I just couldn't." She hung her head. A few loose auburn and grey strands fell from it and across her face. "Even after everything, I just couldn't."

She turned to Kafei. "I'm glad you came," she said, and closed her eyes. "After my husband left, I have had so little faith." The wrinkles at the corners of her mouth cut through her face with a severe frown. "I only wanted to spare my daughter. I didn't want her to go through what I went through. I couldn't see how different our situations were- only the similarities." She held the Moon's Mask out to Anju and Kafei. "Please take this with my blessing. The faceplate at the center witnessed my married life. Please show it a fuller one in yours."

Anju accepted.

"Take this, too," said Cremia, sliding open the bottom drawer of her bedside table. She pulled out a thick, plain, pale white mask.

"This was my parents' wedding mask," she said. "The one they made when they put the two of theirs together. Their witness gave it back to me after they died. Use it." She smiled, teary-eyed. "Someone should."

Kafei shook his head. "But Cremia, this is your family's-!"

"I want to see my best friends get married," said Cremia, with a watery smile. "I want to be a part of your special day. You've excluded me for too long. Let me help." She squeezed Romani's shoulder. "That's all I want, now."

The cruel light streaming through the window grew brighter, now, and the tremors in the earth became almost constant. The group huddled together until the worst of them eased off.

"Go ahead," Cremia urged, and extended the mask towards Kafei.

Kafei accepted, and held it towards Anju.

Anju mirrored him with the Moon's Mask.

Then, they disappeared. The light in the window grew blindingly bright and all-enveloping, and the earth's death throes broke apart the walls to let more come streaming in. Someone screamed, but it was muffled by a booming voice calling out over the horizon and bursting through the walls:

" _I will consume,"_ it said. " _I will consume everything!"_

Then, an ocarina's piercing string of notes cut through the chaos, the wedding ended, and the three days began again.

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

Author's note: Next chapter is the last, I am pretty sure. :) thank you all for reading!


	32. Fierce Deity's Mask

The floor shook, and the walls creaked. The open door to the Stock Pot Inn staff room shuddered in fear on its hinges, but Anju and Kafei hardy noticed. They only had eyes for one another. The open sockets in the masks of the sun and moon shining in their hands from the loose, red light of the sky outside met, too, and drew closer with slow, deliberate steps until they met at the foot of the wooden mannequin wearing Anju's wedding dress.

"I know you," said Anju, quietly, warmly. "What a familiar scent. Long, long ago." She glanced down at the silver moon mask in her hands. "Yes. We were still young. We made a promise, didn't we? The masks of the sun and moon. We were to exchange them on the day of the Carnival of Time."

Kafei held out his arm like he intended to escort her down the aisle between her and her mother's beds. "Anju, I'm sorry I was late."

She smiled, and kneeled to his height. "Welcome home," she said, and threw her arms around him.

He buried his head in her neck. Anju held him tighter and did the same, and his dark, shoulder-length hair bubbled over the side of her arm and into her face. She inhaled deeply as Kafei reached up to stroke the back of her head.

Tatl snickered quietly in his ear. "They're lovers, but they look just like mother and child."

He looked away from Kafei and Anju and looked into the dim fireplace, overcome by the hard lump bobbing in his throat.

Tatl noticed. "What?" she asked. "What? Don't they?"

He shook his head and waved her away.

He never understood marriage as more than a vague institution adult Hylians and Ruto talked about, but watching Kafei and Anju made him wonder. If he had found Saria before the darkness in the Lost Woods dragged her away, would she have smiled at him like that, even if he stood in front of her a warped, abominable body? Even if he told her that the clay ocarina she gave him broke? Would she have welcomed him home?

Would she have accepted him, anyway, the way Anju accepted Kafei?

"Let us exchange the promised masks," said Kafei, quietly, and held out the Sun's Mask.

Anju answered with the Moon's Mask, and just like that, the two of them were finally, _finally_ able to greet the morning together. It all appeared so simply and so plainly, the complications of every other version of these three days faded away like dew under sunlight.

He accepted their token of gratitude without a word, swallowing the knowledge that he would never feel the calm fulfillment they did in that moment, and walked away without a goodbye.

OOOOOOOOOOOOOO

"So we're all s'posed to be stuck here with no Carnival?!" Carpenter Mutoh cried. "Is that how it's s'posed to be?!" Watery brown stains riddled his white undershirt, and his blue overcoat slid over his wide shoulders in an unkempt, uneven pile. "Because the Mayor got sentimental over some twerp in a wedding mask?! Bah!"

The dog yipped in agreement until another of the earth's sudden tremors spun it into a quivering ball at Mutoh's feet. Beside it, Captain Viscen's immaculately polished armor rattled and clattered against the pile of itself on the ground until Mutoh kicked it apart with a scathing curse. Its scattered metal pieces spread the reflected light of the Southern Plaza's single lit torch in fascinating arrangements over the stone. Viscen himself stared blankly at the mess alongside his lieutenant, both of them uncharacteristically dishevelled in nothing but their underclothes and thoroughly drunk on whatever it was Mutoh bribed them with to make them stay put these last hours. A trail of overturned bottles arranged by their feet outlined their evening in greater detail as, together, they spiralled out of the role of disciplined, martial paragons and into that of vulgar town nuisances alongside their carpenter nemesis.

The guard still stationed at the Southern Gate on the other side of the plaza struggled to ignore them.

"If he had a brain," began Viscen's lieutenant, "it might be nice that he finally grew some spine, but noooooo!"

" _Noooooo_!" screamed Mutoh, like the volume of their relative displeasure and depth of contempt was a contest of comparisons. "Ohhhhh, _noooooo!_ Grow a spine?! _Bah!_ Not _that_ shrimpy shit!"

"Free to make their own decision, he says!" continued Viscen's lieutenant. "Every citizen of Clock Town, he says! The citizens! Yeah, the cit'zens!"

" _Stupid_!" interjected Mutoh. "It's all stupid!"

"It's all stupid! Yeah!" returned the lieutenant.

"Idiotic!" bellowed Mutoh, right into the lieutenant's ear.

The lieutenant screamed into Mutoh's face. "Yeah! Idiotic!"

" _I_ said that!" proclaimed Mutoh, heatedly, and with a thick finger aimed squarely at his own chest. "I _just_ said that, you blithering idiot!"

" _Yeah?!_ So did _I!_ "

Mutoh reddened under his white moustache. "You—!"

"Oh, yes, the citizens get to decide!" Viscen's piercing voice stuttered between a laugh and a wail, and pulled the others apart. "But the public servants? The guards? Are we included in that category? Oh, no!" His posh, crystalline-clear diction muddied under the influence of whatever mingled with his blood. "Oh, _nooooo!_ "

"Not us!" agreed the lieutenant. "Not the soldiers!"

" _Shaddup!_ " Mutoh hollered, and spat out some crud from the back of his throat. It hit the ground with a splort.

"Shaddup?!" contested Viscen, belatedly. " _Shaddup?_ About what?!"

"You've been screaming bullshit for three whole days!" Mutoh cried. "I'm _sick_ of it!"

"Whaaat?!" said the lieutenant. " _You've_ been screaming at _us_ for three whole days! Why should _he_ shaddup, and not _you?!_ "

Mutoh rose to his full height and impressed his fury upon them by lifting himself even higher on his toes with each word. "Because _you_ still have your jobs, you _ungrateful wretches!_ " Spittle flew from his mouth into Viscen's face. "Not that you would if _I_ were your boss, you _damn layabout_!"

For a moment, Viscen looked like he might slug Mutoh across the jaw and send the empty plaza into a brawl, but then his chiseled face split into a gasping, delighted smile like he'd discovered the funniest thing in the world.

"Like we wouldn't quit first, like everyone else you work with has!" Viscen said, hysterical with glee. "Nobody can stand you but us, and we hate your guts!"

Mutoh scowled and, after deliberating with himself over whether or not to crush Viscen's head between his massive palms, pushed him away. Viscen stumbled and giggled his way to his lieutenant, who shared in his manic joy like a baby mimicking his smiling mother. When the ground shook and sent the bottles at their feet tittering and jingling, they ignored it in favor of more laughter.

Mutoh spat at them, again, and then sneered at the surrounding Southern Plaza.

In front of them was the stone Clock Tower, etched and painted with enormous whorls and concentric circles weathered from age, and behind them the unfinished Carnival tower draped in purple, teal, and orange-gold banners. Above them were the hungry, glowing eyes of Majora, but he would never notice the red-eyed stare for that of the larger and more obvious moon.

"My damn apprentices," he muttered. "They all ran. Cowards. Not worth a green shard I gave 'em." He whirled on the two soldiers. "Feel lucky you're still getting _paid!_ And by _my_ taxes!"

"How wonderful," said the lieutenant.

"Yes, how wonderful," agreed Viscen, without an ounce of sincerity. "'M so grateful that m' men and I are getting paid to die under the crushing, granite ass of, of the, of the moon. That makes it _aaaaall_ better."

"For the last time!" screamed Mutoh. "What kind of men are you?! That thing isn't going to _fall!_ Use your eyes!"

Mutoh pointed to the moon. Its too-close face appeared as nothing but two huge, red-orange eyes peering down over a rough and cratered backdrop of grey. Its massive teeth clenched together tightly, pregnant with anticipation for the moment of arrival, pregnant with anticipation for the moment it opened its great mouth and swallowed Clock Town, swallowed Termina, swallowed all of time and thrust the world into chaos.

"See?!" Mutoh said once the earth stopped moving, smiling under his thick moustache. "Nothing to worry about!"

There was no sky above anymore, only the trembling silhouette of Clock Town and the ticking hands of the Clock Tower. It read fifteen minutes until midnight. Viscen broke down and cried in spluttering, unintelligible tears of despair.

"We're all gonna die!" wailed the lieutenant.

At that moment, Tatl and her companion hurried through the plaza with all the grace and panache of a light summer breeze. In the boy's hands was the last and only jug of koumis left in the town walls, and without a word, he handed it to Viscen and his lieutenant. They wasted no time popping it open and downing the contents between them.

"That's Chateau Romani, boys," Tatl said. "Slow down and enjoy it."

"Madame Aroma releases you of your duties," her companion added. He planted the Postman's red hat on top of his own green one, and pulled out an envelope with her official seal. "She's just fired the postman. You see?"

" _What?!"_ said the lieutenant, snatching up the envelope.

" _What?!"_ echoed the wallflower guard at the Southern Gate from across the plaza.

" _Aroo?!_ " said the dog.

Viscen spat out his koumis, gasped, and then cried more spluttering, unintelligible tears of joy as he wrapped his arms around his lieutenant and pulled him close.

Viscen's lieutenant returned the hug, and then thrust his fists into the air with gusto.

"You're all cowards!" Mutoh criticized. "Your position is _wasted_ on you!"

"Cowards!" The lieutenant and his captain cheered in tandem, though Viscen's proved waterier than his lieutenant's. "Here's to the cowards! To the deserters! The wisest and best of us! Cowards!"

Mutoh fumed. "It's not something to be proud of!"

Viscen scuttled around the Carnival tower and pointed to the flabbergasted guard still at his post.

"Hey," Viscen said. "Hey you! Flee! You're," he giggled, " _we're_ aaaaall _ffffired!_ "

The guard dropped his spear and sprinted towards them.

"We're fired!" cheered Viscen, again, snot-nosed. "Fired, fiiiired!"

"Let me, let me see that!" the guard said, snatching the envelope away from the lieutenant and forcing it open.

"Oh, careful! Caaareful!" said Viscen. "Might have to discipline you for that one, soldier!" He snorted. "That is, if he were still your lieutenant! Ha!"

The lieutenant and Viscen laughed at one another as they exchanged the koumis. "Ha!"

They laughed at the dog. "Ha!"

They laughed at Mutoh. "Ha!"

"Oh, shaddup!" hollered Mutoh.

Meanwhile, the guard scanned the letter and then panned over everyone's faces, agog.

"We can leave," he said, incredulous. "We've been relieved."

Viscen dropped his pants and urinated on his breastplate in a glassy yellow arc. When the earth trembled again, so did the stream, and the urine splashed against the base of the unfinished Carnival tower in haphazard stains. The thick, putrid smell bloomed immediately in the still air and spread throughout the plaza.

"Augh!" screamed Mutoh. "Disgusting!"

"Relieve this!" Viscen crowed. "I'm've been relieved! Ha ha! I'll _show_ you relieved! Woo!"

The dog barked and added his own mark on the captain's armor, too.

"Relieved!" agreed Viscen's lieutenant, passing the koumis to Mutoh and jamming his clumsy hands into his waistband to do the same.

"But it's too late," said the guard, shaking his head and looking at the sky. "We can't possibly outrun this thing now. It's too…"

The three ex-soldiers all looked at the moon with rapidly sobering faces.

Viscen's stream of urine trickled to a pathetic stop. His lieutenant gave up on his pants and joined his captain in breaking down into spluttering, unintelligible tears of despair, but now with a growing wet stain on his crotch. The dog joined in their wailing, and together, they reeked of misery and piss.

Mutoh endured the raucous, putrid nonsense red-faced, furious, and fixated on the moon. His broad face deepened so much in color from the top of his bald head to the base of his thick neck that his white moustache appeared almost glowing by contrast. At first, it looked like he might explode into another climax of the tirade he'd built up for the past three days, but then something in his hard eyes gave way.

He trembled. It flowed through him like water penetrating the hard earth after a lifetime of drought, or like a rigid and stalwart tower slowly giving way under the massive, relentless thumb of time and the elements on its supports. He looked from the moon, the soldiers, the plaza, and his unfinished Carnival tower like he'd been in a dream up until this very moment, and only now did he see the situation for what it was.

Mutoh wiped at his moustache, and then his eyes. His broad chest heaved as he slowly buckled under the moon weighing heavy in the sky above them.

"Four Giants," Mutoh said, softly. "None of it mattered, did it? This Carnival. My apprentice's school. Pushing away my wife. All my hard work. None of it mattered." He shook his head. "It doesn't matter how much of this town I built." He sucked in a breath. "In the morning, it'll be gone. It'll all be gone. It didn't matter at all."

Tatl lighted onto her companion's shoulder. "No," she said. "Not really."

Mutoh brought the jug of koumis to his lips with a trembling hand.

"You have these last hours, though," said the boy. "They might matter, if you let them. It's up to you."

He paused, and surveyed the empty plaza. "I'm sorry I can't offer you anything more than this." He tapped the koumis. "Do with your time what you will."

Then, he slipped away to the Clock Tower until Tatl separated from his shoulder like the sail of a parachute trailing from its burden. She chimed, and he slowed in the wake of her drag.

"Tatl?" he said.

"What are you doing?" she asked. "Shouldn't we turn back time again? This cycle's played through. You can't do anything else."

He rested a hand on one of the twin doors covering the first of its three entrances. "No," he said. "There's one more thing I can do, inside. Then, at midnight, it's…"

He looked up.

"...It's over, one way or another."

Tatl hovered in front of his face, buzzing. "No, but, but, but, why? Why now? We have all the time we need! Shouldn't we take another cycle? What about, uh, about," she bit her lip. "Uh…"

"What about what?" he asked. " What else is left? The time is upon us, Tatl, _pun intended_."

"But why so soon?!" Tatl cried, weaving through the air in place with wide, deliberate loops. "We don't have to do this now!"

He caught her in a quizzical stare.

"What about your brother?" he asked. "What about Tael? Didn't you say that the thought of him re-living the dread of these last hours made you hate these cycles of days?" He vividly remembered her glow fighting with the third day moonlight outside the Stock Pot Inn, cursing her powerlessness, cursing his methods, cursing him. "Didn't you want all of this to be over?"

Her hard stoicism plastered over tumultuous depths he could not begin to parse. He blinked back at her, stupidly lost. Behind them, the soldiers' cries bounced over the plaza, and the stray glow of their single torch flickered and danced around the shadow he cast upon the Clock Tower's wooden door to make him appear Tatl's opposition. The two of them held the other's eyes, unflinchingly: a fairy made of light, and a creature silhouetted by darkness.

Her cheek spasmed.

"Tatl, what are you trying to say?" he asked. "I'm doing what you wanted."

"I just," she began, and then shook her head.

"Isn't this what you wanted?" he asked.

She swallowed. Her light was so small in comparison to the looming scale of the walls towering above them, and the vast, empty plaza around them. The soldiers and Mutoh could be millions of leagues away, for all they mattered.

"Nevermind," she said. Her misty eyes darted to the Clock Tower door. "The, the Salesman. Is that what this is about? Are you going to, to tell him? Tell him you're going?" She wiped at her eye. "I don't trust him. Wouldn't it be better if we took the mask and hid it ourselves?"

"No," he said. "He'd know. He'd find it."

"How?" asked Tatl. "He's tricky, and strange, but he's one man. What's that to you? The Skull Kid and I bested him as a couple of small-time pranksters. Time moves forwards and backwards for you, and shadows dissolve at your will. How could he possibly threaten _you_ , of all people?"

At the beginning of Termina's end, the Salesman had appeared like a spirit from a place unseen and offered a trade of power for power: Majora's Mask in return for breaking his curse; Majora's Mask for the ability to change his face; Majora's Mask for the power to create an unnameable number of masks from the pain of an unnameable number of souls. The Salesman sat among the gears of the Clock Tower, waiting with the answers to questions nobody thought to ask him but that desperately needed answering; waiting with the power to change fates; waiting with the means for miracles in his bag: the god in the machine.

"He threatens me because he knows things I do not," he admitted.

"But," Tatl complained, "what could he possibly know?"

What could he possibly know? That was the question. The Salesman's smile stretched far and wide across his mind's eye. In thin, dexterous hands was the Mask of Truth, offered, and by his head hung dozens of other masks with unimaginable powers and stories; powers and stories for the Salesman alone, like those of Majora made so many times over.

Tatl shook her head and dove into his hat.

"N-nevermind," she said. "Forget it."

"Tatl?" he asked.

"It doesn't matter. Forget what I said. Do what you think is right."

He stalled. In his experience, the right thing usually made everyone besides himself happy. That was what ultimately made it right, not the intention, and Termina so far neglected to contradict that. Kaepora Gaebora, the great owl, said that this land was destined to fade, but made no move to deny him the opportunity to change that fate when the opportunity arose. Instead, he guided the way for two travelers to unravel destiny and push Termina's end away. And anyway, the Goddess of Time and Tatl's brother were held hostage by that destiny, and he had made a deals regarding _both of them_ , among others.

He pushed the Clock Tower doors open on creaking hinges, and slipped inside like wet soap between fingers.

Little light permeated the innards of the Clock Tower, but what moonbeams peered through outlined his silhouette over the ground and illuminated the quiet, green moss and pale lichens scattered over the mortar and stone. The moon outside sent the earth in tremors, but in here, the foundation was calm and still. Time moved differently inside of the Clock Tower than outside, because inside, it didn't move at all. It was made here, and pushed out to the four worlds on the river's current.

The Clock Tower forced him to relearn how to _be_ with every open and close of its twin doors. Stepping from a place ruled by seconds cascading into minutes into hours and into stagnant infinity threw his head and stomach into unsynchronized circles from one another. Here, he spun like a paper boat pushed suddenly from a current and into the doldrums with no clear way back. It was like stepping from solid ground into thin air, and then floating in nebulous suspension instead of plummeting to the earth.

On the left side of the main chamber, an ornately crafted iron rail guided the wooden ramp down to the tower's foundation, where the underground river and waterwheel met. The wheel's steady revolution powered all the gears in the tower, and then the shaft piercing its center. Together, they ground out eternity into seconds of dust between their cogs. Across the river was a long-forgotten metal door held firmly shut by age and a thick lock, unlike the front doors that opened for anyone. But above them, above both the basement passage and the open double doors, above his head and hidden in the clock's throat, a third door waited to open as it did once a year- just after the final midnight of the old year, when every moment heralded something new and unknown.

Three entrances. Three days. Past, present, future. In the chamber secured by all three, the Salesman waited, smiling beneath his bulging backpack of wares, and ready to make a transaction.

"Did you bring my mask?" the Salesman asked.

He descended the handful of stairs from the door to the main level, and nodded to the clicking rhythm his steps beat out against the cool stone. Each one sent a new bubble of nervous energy rising through him.

"I did," he said, guarded. "But there's something I need to know before I return it to you."

"Oh?"

He paused.

In the sunbathed stone streets of Castle Town in a Hyrule that would never be again, a suspicious, bright-colored tent sprang up from the foot of the Temple of Time like a weed grown overnight. The front mimicked a simplified face with thick lips, and stripes of purple, yellow, teal, and red covered the sides. As a younger child, he had counted the stripes one by one before stumbling into the tent's gaping, red-lipped mouth in a stupor of wonder and curiosity. Inside, the shelves for the back curtain wall were still plain, unassembled wood, and a series of banners decorated with red ink waited in curled-up knots on the floor. Teal and red urns held down a series of printed fliers and posters in Hylian and several other languages he did not know.

He looked around in bewilderment until one of the thick, red curtains at the back of the tent parted, and a peculiar man with an even, manicured part in the center of his red-brown hair smiled eerily down at him from over the unfinished counter. The golden thread and beading on the broad collar of his purple coat sparkled on his neck like the laughing waters of a brook running over rocks, and his hands clasped together to hide an agenda only he knew.

The Happy Mask Salesman: his first employer. He appeared just the same then then and there as he did here and now. But was he the only one to remember it that way, or did the Salesman know it, too?

A chasm of shadows in the space between the two of them delineated the unknown, but with the mystery came the security of his own isolated thoughts. He could ask, and drag out the uncomfortable truth from its hiding place, or he could keep quiet, hold the door closed, and leave what lurked behind it undiscussed.

But he had to bridge the gap between two of them. He had stalled too long on the other side of the Salesman's enigmatic grin, and he could wait no longer. If he retrieved Majora's Mask, or if he failed and the moon came down, he may never get another chance.

"Do you know me?" he asked, cautiously, like tentative fingers pressing the unfamiliar keys of a piano one at a time. "Because I know you. I sold masks for you across Hyrule when you first opened your shop."

Tatl's fingers twisted in his scalp.

"Hyrule?" The Salesman chuckled. "Oh, but I have no business there now."

"But you did. I sold a mask to the Skull Kid on your behalf. A horned skeleton mask." he fidgeted. "Except, he didn't give me any money for it. You were so furious with me that you started screaming and threw me out. I don't know what made you forgive me, but you did- and then you gave me the Mask of Truth."

"A terrifying mask," said the Salesman, still smiling.

He ground his back teeth and peered at the hunched-over Salesman. In the darkness, the brown canvas of the oversized sack on his back faded into the shadows, and the carved, painted masks hanging off the sides appeared like a series of heads floating in the air like a disembodied entourage. He recognized a few of them from his life before this, but what they meant, or what purpose they served, he never knew. He had never thought to ask before. He never realized they were anything more than decoration.

"Do you know me?" he asked, again.

"I should hope so. You are the person I have tasked with retrieving my mask."

"That doesn't answer my question," he said.

The Salesman's smile glinted back at him beatifically. "Do you have my mask?"

They waited, an unbreakable facade and insatiable curiosity. His lips curled into a snarl as he forfeited the standoff and brought out the Garo mask from his bag.

The Salesman tilted his head at it, curious. Its golden faceplate glimmered along with the Salesman's gold-beaded collar, and the sheen of its deep purple cowl rippled in the moonlight with the same pattern as the Salesman's purple coat and pants.

"That's a Garo Mask, isn't it?" asked the Salesman. "You must be quite courageous to have that." He shook his head, still smiling. "You've done some good work! But that is not my mask."

"This is your mask," he said.

"That is not my mask," said the Salesman. "That is the mask of the spies who watch over Ikana."

"This is your mask."

The Salesman smiled blithely in the shadow of the moonlight filtering in from above. "I'm sorry, but that is not my mask. This is not what I asked you for."

The two of them stared at one another, one an adult and one a child, one with a frown and one with a smile, and both with a collection of disguises to offer in place of their names. The slow grind of the waterwheel groaned and splashed beneath their feet.

"Just go," whispered Tatl from her hiding place within his hat. "You really think he's going to tell you anything? He sells masks, not the secrets behind them." She squirmed. "I barely think he's _human_."

He felt something twitch in his neck, and before he weighed the consequences, he pulled the Mask of Truth from his bag with his free hand.

"A terrifying mask," said the Salesman.

He put it on. "To you, maybe."

The Salesman smiled noncommittally.

"Who are you?" he asked the Salesman.

The Salesman laughed. It was an airy, high, practiced thing ringing through the darkness of the Clock Tower.

"Why, what a strange question! You just said you already knew," said the Salesman. "A Happiness Salesman. That's what I am. We are birds of a feather after the same end: we bring happiness to the people around us, albeit in a... _roundabout_ way."

The Mask of Truth offered no inconsistencies, but added: _I have to make money somehow, you know. We don't all have the privilege of stumbling across hordes of treasure the way you do._

He scowled. "That's not what I am asking."

"Oh, the youth of today," lamented the Salesman. "So disrespectful towards their elders. So suspicious."

 _Sometimes I wonder why I haven't fired you_ , the Mask of Truth gleaned.

The gears in the Clock Tower hitched. He felt a vein pop from his forehead. The Salesman knew who he was. He knew all along, and he never said anything.

"Sometimes I wonder I haven't quit," he hissed, and held out the Garo Mask with a trembling hand. "This is yours, or one like it. You stole it during the war with Ikana. You stole it to trick the Garo into bringing you inside the Stone Tower."

"I don't see what any of this has to do with retrieving Majora's Mask," said the Salesman.

 _You really think you're going to get something I haven't already told you out of me with that thing? I've been at this a lot longer than you have, boy. Don't test my patience._

He hissed in frustration, and crammed the cowl of the Garo's Mask beneath the faceplate before jamming it into his bag.

"I'm not sure giving Majora's Mask to you is the right thing to do."

A cord in the Salesman's neck twitched. "Eh?" he said.

 _EH?!_

"Our deal is off," he said. "I'm not giving it back to you."

The muscles in the Salesman's face froze and twitched like an engine stalling before finally catching after agonizing seconds of unsuccessful strain. Mask of Truth or no, the poignant schism between the Salesman's bright smile and the mounting darkness within him sent a chill through the air like a bad note reverberating through the Clock Tower.

"You're refusing?" The Salesman muttered. "You won't get my mask back?! You're _refusing?!_ "

Instantly, The Salesman's hands were on the boy's shoulders, piercing his skin, ripping his clothes, shaking him. His square head loomed with a grotesque, uncharacteristic grimace, and his narrow eyes flew wide open. They were an angry, strained red.

The Mask of Truth flew from his face and fell uselessly to the ground.

" _You won't get my mask back?!_ " The Salesman cried. "I have _everything_ riding on you! You say you won't get my mask back?! You're _refusing?!_ Do you understand what I sacrificed to get that mask?! Do you know what I had to _do_ to get that mask?! I trusted you!"

The next instant, the Salesman's hands clutched his head as moaned to the ceiling. The masks on his bag clattered as they collided with canvas and one another as the Salesman's body swayed and staggered with horror. Then, the Salesman disappeared- and then reappeared across the room, and then disappeared and reappeared on other side of the room, then on the ceiling, and then on the ground where he started.

"If left alone, that mask is capable of terrible things! I've told you this before! Did you not believe me?! Oh! We're all doomed! Doomed!"

"I'm not falling for that again!" he said. "You're obfuscating the real issue!"

He reached for the Mask of Truth, but the Salesman was somehow already stuffing it in his bag.

"Obfuscating?" The Salesman cried. " _Obfuscating?!_ Me?! Weren't you the one telling stories of a reality that never happened? You're the lost Hero of Time, but somehow _I_ am the mysterious one?! Oh, the youth of today!" he wailed. "Such disrespect! Such hypocrisy!"

"How can you _possibly_ know that?!" he said. "You say you never had a shop in Hyrule, and yet you know things like that!"

"I never said _any_ of that! You've been putting words in my mouth!" The Salesman's taught, bent fingers gestured passionately over his bent knees. "Of course I know about you! I _followed_ you! I told you that when we first got here! This is not a secret! Do you think I would have asked this of you if I _didn't_ know who you are, if I didn't know what you'd done?!" The Salesman pulled at his hair. " _You_ _work for me!_ Did you think I wouldn't run a background check on my employee?!"

" _How do you remember any of that when nobody else does?!_ "

"How do _you?!_ "

The Salesman came shy of shaking his associate by the throat, but not by much. To be fair, his associate stopped short of doing the exact same thing, and they fumed wordlessly at one another with only inches between them until the Salesman's anger dissolved into red-faced sobbing.

His breath smelled distinctly of mint.

"You never said anything about it to me," his associate said, chest heaving. "That's all you had to do. That's all I wanted. But you didn't! You-!"

"You never said you knew me, either!" countered the Salesman. "How was I supposed to know what you wanted? How?!" He pointed to the white, three-peaked lip of the Mask of Truth protruding from his bag. "Unlike you, I don't make a habit of reading minds!"

He roared. "Are you _serious?!_ "

"Have I not been a fair employer?!" interjected the Salesman, moaning. "Haven't I been telling you what good work you do?! Haven't I been clear in my directions?! Haven't I been flexible with my deadlines?!"

His heart pounded in his ears, obstinate, and without a clear tempo. "You've been as cryptic as an old proverb carved in stone, and just as transparent!"

The Salesman grabbed his head and spun on his heel. His golden collar flashed in the light. "Oh! Good help is so hard to find, these days!"

"Do you _really_ believe that's the whole problem?!"

The Salesman rumpled his own immaculate hair into a snarled mess, furious, and then sent his shaking fists to the ceiling before feebly dropping them to his sides. He snivelled to the stone floor.

The Clock Tower's gears trundled along, unconcerned, and clattered through the walls with a mournful, lonely echo. The sound cast a trance over the two of them until their breathing steadied and the latent echoes of their voices in the Clock Tower faded into nothing.

"I went to great lengths to get that mask," the Salesman admitted. His voice was hollow, like wind blowing through an instrument so old that only the elements could make it sing. "Ikana was the price. But to let it fall into the hands of the Garo, knowing how it triumphed over the Fierce Deity so many years ago?" His hands clutched his upper arms like he could feel the cruel wind of a dark omen brewing in the air and cutting through his purple and gold clothes. "No. I could not do that. No, no, no."

"Deity?" he asked.

"A vindictive creature," the Salesman said.

His fear and reverence echoed in the Clock Tower like a stone striking water. The tranquil stillness in the air rippled, and then burst apart in an illusion of white-hot flame. The masks floating by the Salesman's head shuddered as a terrible figure crowned in the fire and painted with red blood appeared before them, screaming.

"Friendless, homeless, nameless. Hateful. The personification of destruction from long ago, before Ikana triumphed as a kingdom of prosperity. God of grief, god of fury, god of vengeance. The Deity was the first meal Majora consumed from Ikana's hands, and the one that sealed their contract."

The Salesman snapped his fingers, and it was gone. He took another silent moment for himself until the clicking and clattering masks floating in the darkness turned with him, pleading, voiceless. For a moment, the Salesman was nothing but one of many faces suspended on his pack.

"Please," the Salesman begged. "Time is not eternal. Please retrieve my mask. _Please_. Barely six hours remain."

He rubbed his temples. The bubbling anger behind his eyes was subdued in the cool, moist air of the Clock Tower, but it had not subsided. Who was this man to remember him, when no one else had? Who was this man to know his secrets?

"Who are you?" he asked. "I need to know."

One of the Salesman's eyes slid open, like a crack in his otherwise smooth face, and then closed.

"If I were to ask you the same question, and you didn't know that I knew what you knew, how would you answer it?"

"I," he said, stupidly, and brought a hand to his chest.

He was not a Kokiri, he was not a Hylian, he was not a child, he was not a man. Almost no proof of his life before existed anywhere, and when he had described it to Cremia, it came out too warped to even understand. His life's record existed in the abstract, and in the minds of those precious few who could somehow remember him as he was in a context that no longer made any sense. He found himself lost in the question like a child lost in the woods.

"I don't know," he said.

"Exactly," said the Salesman. "It's infuriating, isn't it?"

He looked to his shoes. The harsh scuffs left by many, many difficult steps taken greeted him. What each was from, he couldn't remember, but the torn holes and fabric worn so thin they let in water were unignorable to everyone who saw them.

"Yes," he admitted, defeated.

The Salesman's smile returned. He retrieved the Mask of Truth from his bag and pressed it into its owner's hands.

Its owner looked from the Mask of Truth to the Salesman in befuddlement.

"I apologize for my perceived vagueness. I am no more- and no less- an ordinary man than you are," The Salesman said. "You understand? I have my weaknesses, and I have my strengths, just as you do, and this task is suited for yours. You must believe in your strengths, and you must forgive yourself your weaknesses."

The Salesman reached out and squeezed his hands over the rim of the Mask of Truth.

"Do you understand? It is as I've told you. You must have faith."

"Have faith," he echoed.

"Can you do that?" asked the Salesman. "I know what I am asking, and I do not ask it lightly. You have done so much good work in Termina already, but you are not yet finished. Have faith in yourself," said the Salesman. "Have faith in your friends. Have faith in _me_."

He swallowed, and let the turn of the clock gears rattle in his mind.

In the time he had known her, the princess Zelda made two courageous mistakes. The first time, she asked him to open the Door of Time and pull out the sword lying in wait on the other side. The second time, she asked him to let her rip open the half-healed wound of the past and sew him inside without explaining what he might find missing, or what it might do. Both times, he chose to have faith in her, and both times, he chose unwisely in the belief that it was the right thing to do.

Meanwhile, the Salesman's terms were always simple, clear, and direct. The only job that ever went bad for him under the Salesman's terms was that of the Skull Kid, who had not only stolen forty rupees, but a mask of impossible value from his employer. But to have faith in the Salesman, after all of this?

A sudden, glittering light reflected off the Salesman's beaded collar and painted an eerie, yellow-white reflection across his jawline and down to the stone floor. As Tatl extracted more of herself from his hat, it grew brighter, and soon, the Salesman's entire face was illuminated in her glow like he was under interrogation.

"Ah," said the Salesman. "I wondered if you would come out to say hello to me." He waved. "Hello!"

"Is this a trick?" Tatl asked. "I'll never forgive you if this is a trick."

"No," said the Salesman. "Any unseen hurdles and conditions of the task I have set, you have cleared already, though I could not pretend to know what you might find upon the Clock Tower's summit. That is a trial made only for you, but you are prepared."

"How do _you_ know?!" pressed Tatl.

"The masks," said the Salesman. "I can see that through your masks. Do you understand? This act is the last, and I would not send you if I did not believe you would succeed."

"The _masks?_ "

"Yes, little fairy. The masks. He has them. Or do you think I hadn't noticed?" The Salesman hummed. "Strange to think that you aren't the only one watching over this child, hm? And here I thought we'd come to an understanding."

Tatl huffed and fritzed in a rainbow of obstinate color as the Salesman reared back his head and laughed.

"Wh-what are you talking about?" she said. "You're weird. You're weird! You don't make any sense!"

"Oh, you're both always so difficult," the Salesman lamented. "I suppose that's why it's taken you so long to make it to this point, but still, it must be exhausting to constantly keep up all these appearances."

Tatl chimed. "Hey! Listen _here_ , you-!"

"What do the masks have to do with this?" he interrupted. His green tunic appeared yellow in Tatl's intense light when he stood directly in front of her. "You talk about them like we need them."

"Hm?" The Salesman turned, shocked, if the height of his eyebrows on his lit face was any indication. "You don't know? I thought you would have figured out why you need the masks by now."

"I'm slow," he said.

The Salesman snorted. "Oh, we all three know that's not true."

"Indulge me."

The Salesman rubbed his hands over one another with a nervous, uncertain rhythm, and furrowed his brow while he decided what to say.

"These questions are always so difficult to answer but so easy to understand once you know," the Salesman muttered.

He hemmed and hawed a moment longer, and then cleared his throat.

"Majora makes deals with its victims," The Salesman began, cautious, lilting. "What they take, they cannot give back, and what they give, they cannot take back. They will try and make a deal with you for power. Can you see where I am going with this?"

"No," said Tatl.

"Maybe," said he. His narrowed eyes scanned the masks peering over him through the darkness.

"Beware its offer. Not all deals in this world are generous or honest." The Salesman's smile turned conspiratorial. "And not all Happiness Salesmen are as shrewd, tenacious, competent, thorough, and kind as you are."

The compliments mystefied him. "I thought you wanted to fire me."

The Salesman shook his head from left to right. "Oh, no. I may want to strangle you sometimes, but even I know your stubbornness is one of your more valuable traits. Frankly, you were wasted in your old life. They thought courage was your only quality of value."

He betrayed himself with a wry smile and rubbed his eyes. Mysterious, eccentric, ineffable, and undeniably charismatic: The Happy Mask Salesman. He hardly knew what to do with his earlier anger.

"So," said the Salesman, chuckling, "my mask. Will you get it back for me, or am I to pursue," he rubbed his hands together, " _other_ options?"

Mysterious, eccentric, ineffable, and undeniably manipulative: The Happy Mask Salesman. He scowled and rubbed his temples.

Tatl's light intensified in the air as she bit her nails and looked from one to the other. She turned a sallow yellow so keen it assaulted the eye. The Salesman might have squinted, had his eyes not been closed already.

"I don't trust you," she said. "I never have."

"But, why ever not?" said the Salesman, tilting his head. "Even after our little chat? I thought surely after you left to retrieve him from the Great Bay Temple that you'd have a change of heart about me." He grinned. "I've done nothing but help the two of you since you got here. I don't understand what I've done to earn your ire. After all, it was _you_ who stole from _me_ to start this whole mess, not the other way around."

Tatl struggled to dredge up a worthy answer, but ultimately pouted in resentful silence.

"He's tricky," her companion admitted. "But I told you- he knows things I don't."

The Salesman laughed his haughty laugh.

He looked up to where the outside light leaked into the Clock Tower through the spaces between the gears. The moon was all but here, and the mask not fifteen stories above him. Failure to retrieve it brought the end of the world crashing down on his head; success brought something unknowable and unnameable, but horrifyingly mandatory. If he took Majora's Mask, he saved Tael. If he took Majora's Mask, he could break the cycle. If he took Majora's Mask, his life would have a tomorrow.

However.

"What are you going to do with the mask?" he asked. "Where are you going to go, once the three days end?"

"Why, I don't yet know," said the Salesman. "Somewhere."

"Somewhere?"

"Somewhere."

He leaned forward. " _Somewhere?_ "

"Yes," said the Salesman. "Somewhere."

Tatl sprang up like a spark crackling off a fire and bobbed in front of her companion. The Salesman's smiling visage burned away in her rampant glow.

"Where are _you_ going to go?" she asked. "Are you going to stay? In Termina?"

He swallowed, suddenly terrified because he felt, without any veils of denial, the moon pressing down over his head, and the reality of the dawn following behind it. Regardless of his failure or success, come moonfall, come morning, come the Carnival of Time, things would change. Everything would change. The end of the ordered, controlled tapestry he wove from these three days would unspool and continue around his feet as loose threads, and his loom would turn to ash. Whatever came next was permanent, unknowable, and out of his control.

"I don't know," he said, wiping his clammy hand over the back of his clammy neck. "I tried not to think about it."

"R-really?" she said. "I thought, I thought, um, because," she looked around, utterly lost, and wiped at the tears forming at the corners of her eyes.

"St-stay here!" she shouted, like all of her willpower compressed inside her throat to oust the words. "Stay with me, and with Tael! We don't have to go to Hyrule. We don't have to go there ever again! We can, we can live in the Woods, and come here whenever we want to!"

Her shout stirred up the still air of the Clock Tower and covered over the steady thrum of gears rotating in the walls so that, for a moment, the walls around him opened wide, and all of Termina spread out in front of him- green, flourishing, inviting. Free. But he thought of Anju and Kafei, and Granny, but also of Cremia and the many, many Zora who thought Mikau was still alive, and Gorons who believed Darmani was the next to lead them. He was in too many places in too many ways, and none of them were true.

"Is that the right thing to do?" he asked his shoes. "How could that possibly bring happiness to everyone?"

Tatl studied him, open-mouthed and empty-handed.

Her voice was small in the vast chamber. "It would bring happiness to me," she said.

His eyes snapped to her. "Tatl, I-!"

From behind Tatl's glow, the Salesman clapped his hands once. The sound reverberated through the tower and pulled all the attention towards him.

"Oh, you two," said the Salesman. "You don't need to know the answer to that now. Don't you know? The future is an unknown to everyone else, and it is only right that it is an unknown to you as well. Make your own choices and do the best you can with the consequences, whatever they may be."

"But-!"

"It's well and good to stop and think about your actions, but that does not erase the fact that right now, you have a job to do!" His eyes didn't open, but his face gave the impression that he was looking between the two of them. "Are you going to do it, or will I be leaving empty-handed?"

"If we fail, you won't be leaving at all," he said.

"You won't fail," he said, shooing the boy and the fairy towards the door.

"How do you know?"

The Salesman's hands opened wide on either side of his body. As he leaned back, his masks clattered, and the bag threatened to topple him over like a pine tree bowing under the force of an unstoppable wind. But somehow, he prevailed, and laughed like the weight meant nothing to him.

"Believe!" he said. "Believe in your strengths. Believe in yourself. Have faith," he said. "Have faith. You can use your time however you want, but even you only have so much of it on your hands. You must believe."

He looked to Tatl. She hung in the air like a ghost as she wiped at her face and bit her lip in agonizing deliberation.

"Tael," she finally said. "My brother. I want to see my brother."

Silently, he nodded, and ascended the stairs to hold open the Clock Tower doors for her. She exited into the Plaza and hovered not five feet from the entrance, pensive. He stepped out after her, but before the door closed behind him, the Salesman called him by his name.

It ran through him like a bolt of lightning. He turned around, struck. From atop the stairs, the Salesman's bright smile appeared unassuming and friendly on the end of his upturned neck. The change in perspective shrank him, like the way the mountains in a landscape faded into the distance the farther on the horizon they stood.

"Have faith," urged the Salesman. "There is more to your life than what you feel right now. Have faith."

Then, the door creaked shut and blocked him out like a curtain falling over a stage. Its creaking thud locked him into the Southern Plaza, where time's steady pace flooded through him like a sudden breath of air after mouthfuls of water.

"Are you really going?" asked Tatl. "You're really ready?"

He looked around.

Mutoh's wide, pale, skyward face greeted him, koumis still in hand. His moustache shifted over his upper lip as he ran his tongue over his teeth, and then looked down at the koumis with pensive, shimmering eyes. The plaza around him was unchanged: three weeping soldiers, a dog, one torch, and the many-colored banners of a carnival without people, like Clock Town was a fully-dressed bride stood up at the altar.

(By now, Anju was long gone from Clock Town, and Kafei was stuck beneath a net in on the far side of Ikana. Under other circumstances, when the stars aligned and fate fell into place in just the right way, they would have been together in about an hour, exchanging vows in Anju's room with only him and Tatl as their witnesses. The mask revealed at the union of the Sun's Mask and Moon's Mask reflected light with a satin sheen and pellucid glaze when it wasn't sitting at the bottom of his bag.

It filled him with envy. No matter how much Anju's eyes reminded him of Saria's, that would never wash away.)

Mutoh sniffed, pulled his moustache side to side on his lip, and stepped forwards.

"I'll tell ya what," he cried. "We don't need any apprentices or any damn wives! We don't need no mayor! We don't need anybody!"

The soldiers looked up from their snivelling.

"But, Mutoh," began Viscen's lieutenant. "The moon…"

"Who cares?!" Mutoh cried. "We can have our own Carnival of Time, together, right now!" He raised his koumis high into the air, towards the moon. "Do you hear that, you damn thing?! You might've scared everyone else away, but that doesn't mean you can suck all the life out of us so easily!" He shook the jug in defiance, and then craned his head towards the soldiers. "Right, boys?"

The soldiers looked at him, flabbergasted and weepy. Snot ran in liberal trails down the lieutenant's face, and the gate guard's pale arms and hands trembled and twitched with each passing second. Viscen hardly looked any better with his pants around his ankles as he regarded the two of them, but with a sharp, determined intake of air followed by a loud, abrasive yell of newfound courage, he waddled over to Mutoh and snatched the koumis.

"Th-that's right!" he screamed, presenting the jug to a surprised gate guard. "We'll party so hard that we won't even notice that moon! We'll party so hard that we'll make it look like a joke!"

"B-but, captain," started the lieutenant, but he caught Viscen's meaningful look along with his sharp, meaningful elbow. "Ow," he said.

With one last, hesitating sniffle, the lieutenant wiped his nose. "W-we'll party so hard we'll forget all about you! We'll party so hard that, that, uh, that we-"

"We'll think we're kings of old!" finished Viscen. "Not soldiers, not carpenters, but kings! Kings of Ikana, kings of the promised land in its golden age! We, the kings!"

"Kings!" echoed the lieutenant.

"Kings!" agreed Mutoh.

The dog barked in excitement.

Viscen pointed at the dog and nodded, swaying. "Brothers, and _kingssss!_ "

The gate guard looked between them, lip trembling, until he found all his courage, inhaled through his nose, and downed a huge swig of koumis in one swift motion.

"Kings!" he cried, coming off the bottle.

Mutoh grinned. "That's the spirit!" he said, and smacked the guard on the back so roughly that he almost spit up what he had just imbibed. "We'll throw a carnival so grand and so great that not even the Four Giants can ignore us! We'll throw a carnival so grand, we'll forget what fear is! We'll throw a carnival so grand that we-!"

The first stroke of midnight shook every foundation and formation within the empty town with a heavy, obstinate clang. Fireworks burst into the sky from behind the Clock Tower in a corona of pink-blue-green-white-red, and sent the reflection of their light over the curves of not only the clock's face, but the moon's. They continued blooming throughout the reverberating bells of the hour with rapid vigor like a neon spring playing out nonstop in the sky even after the last stroke of midnight. Then, from the center of the emerging color and billowing smoke, a dark, rough mass pierced through and lifted into the sky like a living animal cresting the waves of the unknown.

It was the Clock Tower's rounded steeple. The shaft inside stretched out of its stone casing and to the top of the sky, and with it rose the tower's entire top half, including the clock face, until the steeple's weight forced the shaft to fall back like a pulled lever and rotate the clock face to the sky. It cut through clouds of smoke and thudded into place like thunder sounding overhead.

In place of the time overlooking the town, the Clock Tower instead featured a painted stone doorway. The stray glow of the erupting fireworks leaked inside and revealed a set of stairs leading up, up, up to the top of the overturned clock face, and to the moon.

The last of Mutoh's bravado disappeared underneath the staggered pops of gunpowder above him. He gaped, humbled, as the continuing light of the fireworks splashed across his upturned face in rapid succession of one another, and over the faces of the soldiers and dog. Their single, shared lit torch and the fireworks above brought them together in a candlelight vigil for the end of the world.

"Beautiful, aren't they?" came a muffled shout from over his shoulder.

He and Tatl turned to see two figures pulling off thick leather faceguards and gloves: one tall and gangly, and the other short and hunched. Once uncovered, the old woman from the bomb shop and her tattooed, soft-spoken son smiled at him.

"They're on a timed fuse. It's our last carnival set," said the old woman, shouting directly into his ear. "We went to a lot of trouble to convince Madame Aroma that they wouldn't light the plaza on fire. It would have been a shame if, after all of that, they lacked an audience." She chuckled and pointed to the sky just as one firework changed color from red to blue. "Did you notice the ones that burn two different colors? My son came up with those," she said, and showed off her few remaining teeth with a grin.

"Aw, mommy," her son complained.

"What?" she said.

"I said, you're embarrassing me!"

She cupped a hand over her ear. "What?!"

"I- oh!" another firework cracked overhead, and his arms lifted in surrender.

His mommy patted him on the back with a tiny, wrinkled hand, and then smiled at Mutoh and the guards, who remained huddled together in paralyzed silence at the multicolored explosions in the sky. Her son balked at Viscen's indecency and leapt to cover his mother's eyes.

She laughed over the crack of gunpowder and waved him away. "Oh, Sonny, I've seen worse than that!"

" _Mommy_ ," he whined, cringing.

"I can stand to have a show or two tonight. It's the Carnival of Time!" she shouted, raising her arms. "The last one!" she added, before shuffling across the plaza towards Mutoh and the guards. "We always did want to see the moon, didn't we?"

"Yeah," her son called back, looking up through the fireworks and nodding. "Yeah…"

He started after his mother, and then turned around.

"You gonna watch with us?" Sonny shouted, crouching down to meet him eye to eye.

Tatl was right. Who was he to suspend the end of the world? Who was he to force everyone in Termina to relive their fear over and over again? Who was he to have control over their whole lives, when he knowingly manipulated their every choice and consequence? Sonny's mother was mugged two nights ago, and Viscen and Mutoh fought one another for their life and livelihoods for days on end. He knew all of that, and in his selfishness, he had yet to give them the chance to move on from those moments. Instead, he took their time for himself, and kept them locked in an unending cycle. He loved the security, the control he had over these three days, but in that moment he realized that every second he stalled was vanity and weakness, and not at all what might help him or the people of Termina. If the people never had a future after this, they were cursed the same as he was, and he would damn them all to the same fate: never growing, never changing, never moving on from the fear and sadness that shackled them to these three days.

Sonny's angular face wore a small, earnest smile, but everything about it tore him to shreds. He reached out a hand for the Clock Tower, like it might save him from facing Sonny if only he touched it. His hand met air.

"I've got," he floundered, pointing upwards, "I've got somewhere I have to be," he finished, backing up and stumbling into the Clock Tower's stone wall. "I've—!"

"Oh, you're gonna go to the top?" asked Sonny, deaf to his words but influenced by the pantomime. "You thinking they'll come this time?"

"What?"

Sonny tried again. "The Giants? You think they'll come?"

The earth below shuddered again, but the fireworks overhead hardly minded. Sonny held out his arms and steadied the two of them through the tremors. A particularly bright explosion popped over their heads in long, layered petals like a chrysanthemum that fell in streaming trails over the plaza.

If he did not go now, he never would, and they would all be lost.

He stared up at Sonny with glistening eyes while the ocarina burned a hole in his pouch. Four Giants, four worlds, four directions. Swamp, mountain, ocean, canyon. Bring them here.

"Yes," he said.

The tremors ceased. Sonny smiled, and then pointed to the narrow maintenance ramp crawling around the Clock Tower and ending at the platform beneath the tower's elevated door.

"You think you can make it?" he asked. "You need a hand?" The changing light glazed over the planes of his leather jacket and bald head so that a splash of color outlined his silhouette.

He and Tatl looked to one another. Her lips trembled the same way his hands did. He swallowed and shook his head, and she hovered to the Clock Tower's ramp like a lantern illuminating a dark mountain road beneath the cover of night.

"No," he said, and followed after her.

He made his way to the top with one foot in front of the other, and a trembling hand against the wall. Above his head, the fireworks crackled and shattered in triumphant showers of light, like they had been waiting all three days for this moment, for this ascent, for the two of them.

His head crested the platform beneath the Clock Tower's third door. The deafening clap of the fireworks in his ears accelerated to a finale, and soon, the plaza sparkled with light and enthusiasm so brightly, its nighttime appearance was indistinguishable from the daytime. He turned to look at it one more time because, come dawn, it might disappear forever.

The first time he stood here, he took the perspective of a stranger in a stranger's body. Now, Clock Town was as familiar as his own hands, his feet, his arms, and the feeling of a mask turning him into someone else. Dynamic shadows collected in the wells of mortar on the town's high, painted stone walls, and the sky shrank in the face of the incoming light. Bits of the surrounding neighborhoods illuminated in the fireworks' glow, and he traced over streets he travelled an innumerable number of times these three days. The unfinished carnival tower's deep shadow stretched all the way to the Southern Gate, and the iconographic clock painted on the center of its banners lost detail in the relentless finale. Around it sat the rows of unmanned, empty Carnival stalls built in preparation for a crowd that would never come, save the seven lonely figures in the plaza's center.

Sonny joined his mommy and the small crowd by the torch, and under the racket of the fireworks, they began shouting and cheering. Viscen and his soldiers retrieved their helmets to wear like masks, and their hands rhythmically swayed in the air in tandem with one another. In front of them, Mutoh stamped his feet and bellowed something from his broad chest while the old woman clapped and shouted in time. In her son's hands was another Blast Mask, same as the one his mommy had given as a reward, only rust red instead of grey-blue. The dog at his feet howled and barked aimlessly in naive excitement at the commotion.

The yellow petals on the Deku flower growing through the cracks in the plaza pavement waved silently, abandoned and unused.

"Go," mouthed the old woman, waving him towards the doorway. "Go!"

He nodded, and with a deep, shaking breath, hurried up the narrow stone steps with Tatl close at hand. The sword and shield strapped to his back clattered against one another in rapt anticipation as the passageway trembled with the earth.

The echo of the fireworks faded with each stair he climbed, until they siphoned him to a round, wooden door in the ceiling. On it was a painting of a bright red sun surrounded by geometric rays; the symbol of the dawn, revealed only when the Carnival of Time transitioned to the morning of the new year.

Tatl chimed. "One more time," she said. "We can do this. Just one more time."

"The last time," he whispered, and slid open the panel with a final, willful resignation of all the control he snatched away from the people of Termina, and from Majora.

He came face-to-face with the moon.

Its teeth stretched across the sky in a gritted, ivory line dotted by tiny scuffs and craters in the shining enamel, and lined by greying gums and bloodless lips. Its wide, bloodshot eyes absorbed him with hungry fury while tiny, fiery tears of stone flew from them and to the horizon below.

In front of it floated the same figure as always- arms crossed, legs bent, and masked head twitching with each passing second- twitching to the same steady rhythm that pumped blood through his veins and ruled his every breath. The malice in the mask's yellow eyes outshone even the ominous red glow filtering from the corners of sky above and reflecting off the vast, wooden clock face watching from below. The pinprick of Tael's light cowering by his side appeared as a speck of dust in comparison.

Besides a masquerader, the skullkid was a musician, a dancer, a troublemaker, and a loner. He kept to himself at the edge of the Woods- always at the edge, like he dared the borders between Woods and Not Woods to rip open and send him falling through- and showed off his skills with the flute to anyone who might pass by. He sang loudest, danced the longest, and laughed the hardest whenever he found something funny, and he _always_ found something funny at everyone's expense but his own. Everything he did came at someone else's expense. He did wicked things with no purpose, and played games with pretend objectives.

However, his cruelty was only twisted loneliness, and though his loneliness was great, his innocence was greater. The Lost Woods never would have immortalized his bones in living wood had he been cruel. It would have left him rotting and naked to the evil of the world, cursed to live life as an armored, skeletal soldier wandering through its depths.

Evil required hateful mettle; evil required steel. The skullkid had and was none of that.

He took a step onto the painted wood and slid the door closed. The crescent moon on its topside stared up at the grimacing one, and at Majora's Mask.

Tael started at the noise. "Sis!" he cried, shocked.

"...Tael," she answered, subdued, with heavy dread weighing down her wings.

Tael's head furtively snapped towards Majora, and then to them. "Swamp. Mountain. Ocean. Canyon. The four who are there. Hurry, and bring them he-!"

The skullkid's coiled body sprang to life. His thin, weathered arms unfolded and struck Tael from the air in one quick motion.

"Don't speak out of line!" he shouted. His thin, reedy voice held a malice unsuited for practical jokes and childish games. "Stupid fairy!"

Tatl saw this moment play out once before, but the sudden fire in her veins ignited as freshly as if this were the first time.

"That's it!" She roared, and gnashed her teeth at the skullkid. "I won't let things go the way you expect them to!"

She turned to her partner.

He nodded. His fingers traced over the holes of the blue ocarina tucked in his shirt, rehearsing the song the Giants taught him while waiting for Majora's Mask to look away.

The skullkid again folded himself beneath the mask, unconcerned. "Well, whatever," he said, anticlimactically. "Even if they were to come, they wouldn't be able to handle me."

He chuckled darkly, slowly.

"Look above you," he said, incredulous, like the situation overhead was somehow ignorable. "If it's something that can be stopped, then just try to stop it!"

He flung his limbs into the sky and screamed to the moon. The sound rattled bones and pierced the ears with a lurid, overwhelming echo, and his body gyrated and twitched as currents of blue and fuschia light emanated from the mask in unruly strands.

The moon's eyes glowed brighter, and its teeth cracked open wider, wider, and wider still until its chasm of a mouth gaped open over the horizon. Renewed panic seized the Clock Tower as the buffer of space between it and the oblivion in the moon's mouth shrank with kindled ferocity.

He put the ocarina to his lips and blew out the melody of the Giants as best he could over the chaotic cacophony playing out around , without pausing for breath, he repeated it once, and then again, and then a third time before looking up at the sky for any sign of a miracle.

He found Majora's bright eyes leaning over him with smug confidence, and the skullkid's crossed arms not far behind.

The Clock Tower fell eerily silent. Even the moon paused in the sky with disbelief.

"Was that…?" The skullkid asked, dumbfounded behind the mask. "Did you just play…?" He floated farther back into the air. "Did you really think that would- augh?!"

He froze. They all froze.

The ground shook, but not from the moon. An echoing refrain called from over the southern horizon along with the sound of crumbling earth. Then, another came, and another, and a fourth, until they were singing on top of one another, louder with each note, and a series of booming thuds closed in on where they were standing.

An enormous figure with two massive, gentle eyes deeply set in weathered, rust-colored sockets blinked down at the figures gathered on the Clock Tower summit. A second figure appeared on the northern side of the Clock Tower, a third on the western, and a final set on the eastern. Their bodies possessed no neck or torso of any kind, only legs and arms as tall as the Stone Tower fastened above and below where their ears should be. Their faces were the images printed on the pages of Granny's old histories and the model of the antique masks displayed in Aroma's oldest collections: wrinkled skin the color of Termina's clay, and mouths obscured beneath beards of huge, thick leaves sprouting beneath prominent noses. The Four Giants: Earth imbued with autonomy.

The Giants began their melody again, synchronized, and together, their voices shook not only Termina, but something inside the skullkid. With a sudden, more mundane scream, the skullkid's hands flew up to Majora's Mask and pulled while his body fell into a convulsing fit. He shook and flailed until his body seized into a sudden stillness, and fell to the ground. His head lolled to the side.

The Giants stretched their arms to their limit as eight huge, red hands appeared over the lip of the clock face and indented the moon's surface with eight brand-new, five-fingered craters. They pushed, and after a grating, cosmic struggle, the red glow of the moon's descent burned away into calm night air. The four of them held it aloft like an offering presented to the heavens, and spared the shuddering Clock Town below.

The mask's eyes flickered out like the embers of a dying fire.

"It stopped," whispered Tatl. "We did it." She turned to her companion, and then brother. "It stopped!"

The skullkid's inert, limp body failed to protest, and the eyes of Majora's Mask stared emptily at the distance like those of a forgotten doll left on the floor by its owner.

"Sis!" blubbered Tael, buzzing around her.

"Tael!" she cried, circling around him.

Her companion approached the skullkid with ginger steps, and then squatted down to take a closer look. His expression was impossible to see underneath the mask, but whatever it was, it wasn't the face of a corpse. Save fire, the axe, and years of rot, nothing could kill a wooden ghost.

In a time that never touched Hyrule, the two of them had almost been friends. They played instruments back-and-forth at one another in the Woods until they created a song, the same as Japas and Mikau. Saria's favorite song was their favorite to play, too, and no matter what else they played, they always came back to it.

He tilted his head. Something didn't feel right. The raised yellow eyes of Majora's Mask stared emptily up at him, like the demon inside was only playing dead, lying in wait for the perfect moment to strike.

"I'm not going to wear you, if that's what you're waiting for," he whispered to the mask. "Whatever it is you think I want, you cannot give me."

The mask stared up at him, silent.

"It worked! We made it in time! The Giants' call made him stop!" Tatl cried. Then, she turned to the skullkid's limp body and rushed towards him with newfound indignation. "Hey! _Hey!_ Do you have any idea what you've been doing to everyone?!"

Tael stopped her. "Sis, no. Don't be so hard on him."

"What?!" Tatl cried. "How can you _say_ something like that?! He hit you! He-!"

"He was," Tael began, looking at the limp body. "He was lonely."

"He was trying to _destroy_ everyone around him! That's _not_ the same as a lonely child!" She reached out her hand and pointed directly at her partner in green. " _That_ is a lonely child."

"True enough," her partner admitted, still holding eye contact with Majora's Mask.

"But what _he_ did?!" Tatl continued, pointing to the pile of skullkid. "We can't allow that!"

"No, no!" said Tael. "The mask! That was all the mask! He couldn't handle it!"

"That's because he's _weak-willed!_ " argued Tatl. "He's weak of will, weak of spirit, and weak in heart! He's a fool who doesn't know his place!"

The eyes of Majora's Mask alighted anew. He threw himself to a safe distance with a curse.

"Certainly," the mask said, in a voice older and deeper than the well in Ikana. "He had far too many weaknesses to use my power," they continued, almost grinning within the confines of their painted, mouthless face and horned perimeter.

" _Exactly,_ " said Tatl, throwing her hands in the air. "That's exactly why-!"

"Tatl! stop acting like you know better and _pay attention to who is talking to you!_ " her companion screamed, fumbling through his quiver for an arrow of light.

She paused, eyes huge, and slowly turned her head.

Majora's Mask rose into the air. The skullkid's limp body came with it. His thin, wooden limbs clattered against one another like a bamboo wood chime while his loose, red and yellow clothing fluttered like autumn leaves ready to fall from the branch.

"A puppet that can no longer be used is mere garbage," Majora explained, and dropped the skullkid to the ground.

He fell into a rattling pile, and the mask remained in the air, held aloft only by willpower.

"This puppet's role has just ended," finished Majora, satisfied.

"B-but," stammered Tatl. "It can't be! Then, the moon, it-!"

She had no sooner said anything than a writhing, glowing trail of transparent, violet miasma reached down from the moon's open mouth like a tongue and enveloped the mask. He drew his bow and fired a bolt of light at it, but only succeeded in momentarily scattering the miasma before it reformed around the mask and sucked it away.

The moon's eyes came to life like gunpowder beneath a lit match's influence, and its rumbling descent began anew. The Giants cried out in surprise, and their long, clay arms strained beneath the force.

"I," the moon said, in a voice that could shatter mountains and lay waste to entire forests, "I shall consume. Consume… _everything._ "

The moon pushed, and the Giants cried out.

"They can't hold it," Tatl said, horrified. "The Giants, they're too weak!" She whirled around to face her partner. "The song," she said. "We've got to go back. Play it! Quick!"

He shook his head and stared at the trail of undulating miasma, bow suspended numbly at his side.

"There's nothing else in Termina that can help us."

"You're not actually going to go up there, are you?!" Tatl screeched. "Are you _crazy?!_ "

"This is the last cycle, Tatl! I told you!" He pointed to the moon. "Either we do this, or we all die!"

"Something is trying to _eat_ you, and you plan on _walking into its mouth?!_ What kind of stupid idea is _that?!_ When has that _ever_ worked for _anyone?!_ "

A wry smile wormed its way across his face. Even after all this time, there were things Tatl did not know about him- first and foremost, he did most of his best work in the belly of the beast.

"We walked into Stone Tower's mouth, didn't we?"

"You're an _idiot!_ " screeched Tatl, eyes wide. "Do you _hear_ me?! You can do that kind of crap by yourself! I'm staying with my brother! I'm staying with Tael! I-!"

"I'll go!" said Tael, already descending on speedy wings.

"What?!" Tatl hollered, and then zipped between her brother and the moon. "What are you _saying?!_ Have you lost your mind?!" Her head butted against her brother's.

They stared at the other, emanating opposing glows of purple-black and yellow-white.

"We can't run from this!" Tael argued, pushing back. "I'm _tired_ of running from this! You say the skullkid was weak, but _we're_ guardian fairies!" He put his hands on his chest. "I'm _his_ guardian fairy! I should have been stronger- I should've been _better!_ I should have been protecting him from the mask in the first place! If I had, skullkid wouldn't've..." he wiped at the sudden moisture on his face.

Tael's tears and body language clued him into what Tatl's immature ramblings and mean jibes had so obviously indicated, but he failed to realize: Tatl and Tael were, for fairies, very, _very_ young.

Tatl frowned ferociously, and then softened when she looked to her companion, who pursed his lips and edged towards the moon's glowing tongue.

"I understand," she said, softly, backing away. "Tael, I don't remember you being so stubborn."

She glanced over her shoulder. Her companion followed her eyes to the undulating miasma and nodded. She nodded back.

"You're both idiots," she said.

With a burst of energy, she whipped around, pushed her brother away from the light, and then dove into it herself. Her companion jumped in after her, and the miasma compressed around them both. It poured down their throats in a suffocating rush before hauling them skyward like a net pulling its catch out of the ocean.

"Sis!" Tael cried, hands out, but he was only a speck of purple light growing smaller and smaller as the painted clock face beneath him spun into a blur of colors until it faded away into blackness.

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

He gasped awake, only to find himself on his feet and without any need for air. He squinted through the sudden, unadulterated light streaming over him until his eyes concentrated it into a pristine white sun illuminating the sky.

Ah, the sun.

The sun.

 _The sun?!_ But what happened to the moon? What happened to Clock Town? He screwed his eyes shut and wrenched them open again before braving another look around.

Beneath his feet spread a thick quilt of fresh, glittering spring green. Gossamer trails and pinpricks of undirected magic flitted and sparkled through the still air like needles of light sewing the field together with invisible thread. Groups of fluttering white butterflies and sprigs of wild carrot danced over a tapestry of wild strawberries and clover stretching as far as the eye could see, including over a gentle swell of earth in the distance. At its apex extended the idyllic silhouette of a single tree. Its leaved branches reached like arms into the blue sky to hold the sun aloft.

Faint notes of distant birdsong prodded through the field's serene blanket of silence, but otherwise, total calm enveloped the field. The heartbeat of time left this place to float like a jellyfish on the current. The sensation filled his head with cotton.

Tatl floated at his shoulder, still squinting. Her hands touched her throat in bewilderment as she realized that she had no need to breathe, either.

"Where are we?" she asked. Her voice was muffled, like the sun above threw down an invisible wall to stifle it the instant she made a sound.

He knew this kind of light-laden air and thick, inviting greenery only existed in the Kokiri Forest Meadow and the surrounding Lost Woods, but they were lousy with noise, shade, and unknowable age. Wherever this realm was, it was divine, but young.

When the goddesses created Hyrule, his father was among the first to grow in their garden of raw light. He probably began his life the same as this tree: a fixed, unshakeable point in a field of naive life too new to understand what it might become. Everything here was fresh, new, and seasonal.

Vulnerable.

When his father, the pillar of security for the Kokiri, fell to the curse of that man in black, only swiftly whispered rumors that the fairyless child committed the murder precluded the oncoming spread of evil seed through the forest meadow's soil. Should the tree on the hill fall, the life around it would have no protection from the evil weeds that longed to choke it out.

Or was this a trick? He took an uncertain step forward. His boot left behind a deep indent in the soft foliage, but it sprang up immediately in a shower of gentle, glowing spores. He looked to the tree again, and narrowed his eyes in a suspicious squint.

As a masquerader in an adult's body, he beheld a single, dead tree in a cavern deep, deep below the ground. Its looming, black reflection stretched over a mirror of still, grey water, and when he stepped closer, his own reflection appeared in the surrounding mist and attacked him. That man in black left both as a cruel, clear message: _I killed this tree like I killed your father, but I've left the blame to you._

Had the mask left him the same kind of coded illusion? He glared at his shadow only to realize that he didn't have one.

Tatl looked at the ground behind them, too, uncomprehending.

He took another cautious step into the grass. It released a new spray of gentle light.

Nothing else happened.

"I think we died," said Tatl.

Even muffled, the sound of her voice desecrated the stillness of the air. He put a finger to his lips and pointed towards the tree.

"You think that thing is gonna hear us from all the way over here?" Tatl argued.

"Maybe!" he whispered.

She rolled her eyes and threw her hands in the air like something in the empty field might empathize with her frustrations, and then fluttered onto his collar.

He walked, cautious in the idle silence, until Tatl excitedly prodded at her companion's shoulder and tapped at his shield. He armed himself and turned around in vicious excitement, heart thundering in his chest to a beat uninhibited by any time signature.

Besides Tatl, no other creature lurked in the field behind him. Instead, the bubbles of light left behind by his boots drew a trail in the air like glowing tufts blown from a thousand dandelions. They drifted over the field and through the sky towards a new, unknown destination.

Tatl tapped his arm and pointed to his shield.

The floating skylights pelted their reflection on the surface of the Mirror Shield like iridescent rain. Its grimacing silver face melted into a sheet of gleaming gold so bright its surface sloughed off the excess light in a rainbow-colored halo. Similar slices of color radiated from the blade of his gilded sword and onto his green tunic. The bits of his hands and arms visible beneath his shield and wrapped around the hilt of his sword appeared to glow from the inside, like he, too, was made of light.

"Beautiful," Tatl mouthed.

He sighed, relieved, and replaced his weapons before turning back to the tree. The deceptively massive quilt of green beneath his feet prevented him from drawing closer in a meaningful way, but it still grew larger and larger on the hill with each step like a mountain growing in definition and color at the edge of a desert.

Tatl zipped in front of his nose and pointed. He followed her finger with his eyes. In the distance, another trail of light like the one inspired by his shoes gently shimmered in the air. He peered closer at the beginning of the trail to discover that it was not one trail, but four.

Four figures dressed in white ran around the crown of the hill, kicking up light with each hurried step. Horns protruded from their oversized heads, though their hands and feet appeared human. They ran after one another in circles over the grass like they were in the middle of some kind of game. Every so often, one of the pursuers would touch the figure in front of them, and they would switch roles. The pursued became the pursuer.

The Kokiri played something similar. One person, the "monster", "ate" the other children by tagging them, or instead used their touch to them into "monsters" as well. Sometimes, instead of immediately running, the children would hide first so the monster had to find them. He was the smallest and slowest at running tag, but he was very good at hide-and-go-seek. Only Saria knew all of his hiding places, so she was the only person he lost to. The others left him to guess if the game was over or not.

From atop the hill, one of the figures spotted him. They broke from the group with a spray of light following their heels like a piece of a comet splitting from its main body and falling to earth. They drew closer, and soon he could make out their face. Three glassy, green eyes sparkled in the light, and the long, chin-height horns framing them revealed themselves as mandibles. Twinmold's Mask. The figure was a child wearing Twinmold's Mask.

But how? He thrust a hand into his bag and blindly groped for the one he stripped from the beasts in the Stone Tower. When he didn't feel the curved, cool surfaces of its three globular eyes, he planted his feet and put a hand on his sword. Tatl stopped him and pointed.

The other three figures followed Twinmold in glowing arcs. All of them were children, and all of them wore masks from the creatures within the four temples of Termina. Goht's golden horns and Gyorg's sharp teeth flashed in the sun while the worn cloth mane around Odolwa's Mask streamed back in a long, bouncing trail in their descent from the hilltop.

The first masked child slowed to a stop just in front of him, and stared with Twinmold's unblinking green eyes. The light floating from his heels sparkled off the surfaces of the mask like it was made of polished jewels, not the grotesque remains of an insect corpse. The fleshy muscles peeking out from beneath the chitin around the mouth might have been polished red marble, had he not known better.

The other three children came to a stop behind Twinmold, except Goht, who skidded spectacularly through the grass and then tumbled to the ground. A wave of light announced where they finally fell in a stationary faceplant.

He and Tatl gaped, dumbfounded.

Twinmold and the other masked children shamelessly ogled them right back. They stared and stared and stared until the time for conversation or combat long passed with the lights floating in the air.

Finally, Twinmold's mandibles tilted towards the sun, and their unblinking eyes stared directly into it.

"Ahh," They said. Their voice was quiet, but unmuffled. "Nice," they dragged out the word like they were unsure what to say next, "weather, isn't it?"

His eyeballs performed a quick lap around the field from unmoving sockets to make sure they had not missed something sinister about the field of light. They hadn't. He nodded.

Twinmold waited, expectant.

He and Tatl watched, clueless.

Twinmold tapped their fingers together and pulled at the worn hem of their white shorts. They reminded him of himself, in some ways, before he left the Kokiri Forest and learned how to speak with other people.

"Masks," continued Twinmold, wringing their hands. "You have," he pointed to his bag, "a lot."

He looked down. In his haste to locate Twinmold's Mask, the displaced the contents of his bag peeked out of the open top like nosy children over a low wall. The Garo Mask's golden crest glinted obviously in the relentless light over the lip of the bag, followed by one yellow ear from the Keaton Mask. He cradled the bag defensively against himself and turned away.

"You, too," said Twinmold. "Will you be," they and the other three children rubbed their hands together in imitation of the Happy Mask Salesman, "a mask salesman?"

Twinmold's green eyes glinted excitedly, gleefully, hungrily. Neither they nor their masked companions had moved, but their presence grew larger and more demanding, like if he refused, the masked children might reach over and take the entire bag from him.

Tatl's trepidation rang out in a muffled chime. She muttered a curse so quietly that the thick air drowned it out, but her lips clearly formed the words "Mask Salesman".

"What will you give me in return?" he asked, frowning. His voice flattened against an invisible buffer the moment he let it out of his mouth.

"We'll play with you," said Twinmold, like it was obvious. "So… the masks. Give me some."

The field had no way in and no way out. It was its own beginning and own end, and though Twinmold appeared a child, he had no way of knowing how true of a reflection this new form was. As he saw it, he had two options: he could play along and keep the children happy, or he could give them a reason to revile and distrust him, and perhaps assume the persona of something more threatening.

He slid the Keaton Mask from his bag and held it out.

Twinmold swiped it with a pale hand and peered at the yellow exterior with ravenous intensity. They ran their fingers over the nose, and traced over the eyes with enthralled gusto before looking up and holding out a demanding palm.

Odolwa ran up with open hands.

"More," they whispered.

He extracted Romani's Mask from his bag and presented it. Odolwa carefully accepted it, fascinated.

Gyorg came next.

" _More,_ " they urged, pressing forward.

He hurriedly pulled the Postman's red hat out of his bag and thrust it towards Gyorg, who clutched it against their chest.

Goht might have bowled into him had he not put the Stone Mask in front of himself like a shield. Goht knocked into it instead, and wrapped his body around its rough surface with a grunt. Their salesman shied away on contact, and the Garo Mask's heavy metal crest tipped out of the bag, dangling precariously by its purple cowl.

" _More!_ " Twinmold said, wrenching the Garo Mask free and holding it above their head. The golden faceplate threw prisms of light over Twinmold's eyes so that it glistened like a faceted crystal fascinated with the light in front of it.

" _More!"_ hollered the other three, and shoved their greedy hands into his bag.

He yelped and pulled away, but not before the Mask of Scents and Bunny Hood slipped out. Gyorg hurried behind him and pulled on the whole bag. He tugged back while Tatl bombarded the child's face with light, but Gyorg held fast. Goht joined them.

"W-wait!" he said. "Wait! What about-!"

The bag tore open with a mighty rip, and he fell to the ground in the backlash. In front of him, a shower of fabric and wood tumbled onto the ground in a clumsy jumble, and the four masked children rifled through it with greedy fingers. Kamaro's shrunken head bobbled from the top of the leather mask clutched in Gyorg's hands, and Odolwa wrapped the long hairs of the Great Fairy's Mask around their arms like a shawl. The Captain's Hat grimaced at Twinmold alongside the hammered metal Giant's Mask, and Goht poked at Don Gero's bulging eyes with glee. The children sorted through the pile of masks until only three remained: Mikau, Darmani, and the Deku child.

A grip of ice seized his heart. The other masks held the hopes, dreams, regrets, and secrets of the people of Termina, but those three contained souls. He scrambled forward and threw his body over the three of them.

"Not these," he said. "Never these!"

Gyorg stopped poking their fingers through Kafei's blank eyes and cocked their head. "Why?"

"They're important," he said. "They're my friends."

Immediately, the four masks snapped to him. Goht's head tilted curiously as they stroked the feathers on the side of the Bremen Mask. Twinmold stopped tapping the skeleton on the front of the Blast Mask, and Gyorg put down the Gibdo Mask to give their full attention.

Odolwa spoke. "Can I ask you a question?"

The other three dropped to the ground, cross-legged, and scooted forward like they were magnets and their visitor magnetic.

"Your friends," said Odolwa. "What kind of people are they? I wonder."

The light in the sky assaulted him like salt on a slug's bare skin. His mouth tasted of cotton and his temples throbbed in a painful tattoo. He swallowed. If the ground decided to split open beneath him and swallow him up, he was defenseless to stop it.

"Th-they're," he stuttered. "My friends, they're…"

The truth was, he never had many friends. Even before he was forgotten, he never had that many. The people he knew were acquaintances, mostly, bound together by a common need. Nabooru, Ruto, Impa, Darunia, Rauru, Malon, Navi, Zelda. What did he really know about them? What did he _ever_ know about them?

He knew Zelda best as Sheik, who never showed his face and never talked about himself. They weren't friends, but they weren't strangers. The two of them navigated around one another in a glass maze. They could see one another, but never come any closer. That's what his relationships were: glass mazes with trap doors at the end. When he navigated through to the heart of one, the bottom fell out and dropped him at the beginning.

Odolwa swayed in place. "Do those people… think of you as a friend?"

Who were the people in his life? Saria was and had been his friend, always, but she was gone. The people of Termina lost their memory after three days. Who was still here? Darmani, Mikau, the Deku child, the Happy Mask Salesman. Tatl. What did he know about them? And what did they know about him?

He gulped, overwhelmed with uncertainty, until Tatl's obstinate chime tore through the field's oppressive calm.

"Yes," she said, terse. "I'm sorry you feel the need to ask that. I'm sorry your pathetic existence is so unhappy that you can't already figure that out."

She scrunched her nose at the four children, and lighted on his shoulder like a warm hand. He smiled despite himself, and wondered when he noticed someone so mean was also so kind.

The children turned to one another and conferred amongst themselves with a series of glances. Besides the masks, the four of them were identical in every way: short, brassy dark hair gleamed on the backs of their heads in neat, manicured cuts, and their pale skin all but blended with the sparkling white of their ragged clothing. The surrounding sunlight made looking anywhere but their faces almost blinding.

The children turned to him and Tatl. Goht supplied their consensus.

"You," Goht said. "What makes you… happy? I wonder."

"Friends, for one thing," said Tatl.

Goht ignored her and muttered something to the ground. He hushed Tatl and leaned in to listen.

"What makes you happy?" continued Goht. "Does it make… other people happy, too?"

He sat on his haunches, surprised. Children. They were really children. Whatever this place was, and whether or not the figures around him were actually the figures on the masks they wore, their naivete was sincere. His earlier trepidation dissolved like sugar in water.

"Are you asking about what I like, or are you asking about morality?" he asked.

The children stared blankly.

What made him happy that made other people happy? He liked a lot of things, but he didn't think describing the way light fell in a quiet wood or the feeling of the soft fuzz at the tips of Epona's ears would capture the interest of his audience. He didn't think they wanted to hear about Saria's riddles or Tatl's bad jokes, or the cream scraped off the top of fresh milk.

"It can," he said. "Sometimes. It depends on what it is. Sometimes the right thing to do won't make you happy at all, but it is usually the choice that is best for everybody."

Gyorg's huge, clouded eyes bobbled as they rocked back and forth on the ground. "The right thing… what is it? I wonder." Their toes rubbed against one another. "If you do the right thing… does it make," they twiddled their fingers in scheming shapes, like they were looking for some kind of loophole, " _everybody_ happy?"

"There's no way to make everyone in the world happy," asserted Tatl. "That's not the nature of things. It's a myth. Not everyone can be happy all of the time." She ignored the masked children in favor of glaring directly at him. "Even if _someone_ out there had the magic power of turning back time again and again to look for the perfect outcome, _and_ they were stupid enough to try, they'd never find it. It's impossible."

He sheepishly scratched the back of his head.

"Even if such a thing did exist, that person would make themselves miserable trying to find it," he admitted. "If we weren't unhappy sometimes, then we never could be happy. You have to have both for the other to be true."

The masked children nodded, fascinated. They leaned into one another and excitedly discussed something without making a sound.

"Your true face," said Twinmold, suddenly. In their hands was the Mask of Truth. "What kind of… face is it? I wonder."

"Excuse me?"

"The face under the mask. Is that… your true face?"

"We're not wearing any masks right now," said Tatl.

The masked children started, amazed, and then leaned in towards the two of them like they had never seen a bare face before. Gyorg came so close that the single horn in the center of their forehead almost hit him between the eyes. Twinmold's mandibles and Goht's horns were not far behind.

And then, it hit him.

"Oh," he said. "You four. You've always seen me in a mask when I found you." His eyes widened. "You've never seen me as I am up close. You've only ever seen Mikau, or Darmani, or a Deku." He gestured to Twinmold. "You saw me, but I was wearing the Giant's Mask."

The children nodded.

"This is what I look like," he said.

The children nodded again, more vigorously, and studied him even more closely. They got to their feet and circled around him to see him at all angles. He fidgeted, nervous, until they satisfied their curiosity and retook their spots in front of him.

"Thanks," Twinmold said. "You're," their globular eyes rotated with a curious tilt of their head, "a nice person."

He and Tatl looked to one another.

"Am I?"

Twinmold nodded. "Hide-and-seek," they said. "Let's play."

"I'll hide!" shouted the other children in unison.

Then, a sudden, scattering mess of bubbled light erupted over the field. He cried out and shielded himself from the sudden brightness. When he peeled his eyes open, unmarred greenery spread over the grass. Neither the children nor his masks- any of them- remained.

"M-Mikau!" he shouted, throwing his hands on the grass and desperately ruffling up new beads of airy light. "Darmani! Hey!"

Tatl flew to the ground and sent her tiny body barrelling through the grass in a ribbon of light.

"They're gone," she said. "They're gone!"

He ran his fingers through his hair and wiped at his face. Where had they gone? How? How was he going to get them back?! He may not have been the one to kill them, but he was the one responsible for their souls!

A tiny tremor shook the field. It was barely noticeable, but all the blood left his and Tatl's faces as they met one another's eyes. Then, another, more substantial fit shook the ground with a tooth-rattling groan.

They were on the moon, and it was still falling.

He whirled around, manic. Behind him was a field of green. In front of him was a field of green. Not a speck appeared anywhere on the horizon except the tree. It leered over the hill like an eavesdropping neighbor.

Plant life and light exploded up from under his feet as he ran up the hill in a full sprint, arms pumping, fists clenched, and cold sweat pouring down his brow. The field shook again and sent him stumbling, but he quickly regained his footing and tore his way to the hilltop, and then to the base of the tree.

It grew from the ground as a clear, direct column of wood tapered to a waist at about half its height. The thick bonnet of branches protruding from its crown cast a perimeter of shade around its base, and within it hid a tangle of waterspouts shooting from its obscured roots, and a single, blooming white lily on a long stalk. Beneath its blossom waited Majora's Mask on the face of a crouching child holding their knees like a secret. Their yellow eyes pulsed in the low light.

"Everyone has gone away, haven't they?" Majora asked.

He stopped running, and collapsed to his knees.

The mask's eyes searched him without moving. "You don't have any masks left to share, do you?"

"They said we'd play hide-and-seek," he said, pressing a hand over his eyes. Everywhere else in the field, his voice stopped short, but under the tree, it echoed with mournful gravity.

This was just like when he was a child in the forest. Mido and the others would ask to see his things, and then run off with them before he could make them stop. They would make promises, and then break their end of the bargain after he gave them what they wanted.

Everyone left him after he gave them what they wanted.

He felt an old, old anger resurface, like everything else he had ever felt was only the stalk and branches of a hated weed, and this was the root. He felt helpless; he was helpless. Tatl had been wrong, when she said he was never helpless. He had always been helpless from the very beginning, and nothing ever changed.

Everyone left him after he gave them what they wanted, and he never wanted to let anyone do that to him again.

" _They said we'd play hide and seek!_ " he repeated, yelling, the veins in his neck straining. A torrential spray of light burst into the air as he slammed his foot into the ground and stood up. "But that's not what they're doing, is it?! They'll _never_ let me find them, will they?! They'll never give them _back!_ "

Tatl called his name. He ignored her. As much as he hated losing his temper, he hated being scolded for it when he knew he was right.

He unsheathed his sword. Tatl called his name again in alarm, and he shoved the blade into the ground. The stems it severed browned and died immediately.

"They think that because they got what they wanted that I can just run around lost _forever_ , don't they?!" He snarled and wiped at the snot running down his nose. "They've taken something _important_ , and they _don't care!_ They think it's _funny!_ "

Majora's unmoving eyes took in the dead greenery, and then the angry child in front of him with a sinister consideration.

"Well, let's do something else," they said, evenly.

"Do," his tongue tripped on his own disbelief, " _do something else?!_ "

"Let's play good guys against bad guys," said Majora.

"You think you can just _fix_ this with another game?!"

"Yes," they said. "Hide-and-seek is no good, so we'll play good guys against bad guys. You won the last game of hide-and-seek anyway, so why not? It's only fair. It's the _right thing_ to do, isn't it?"

He staggered backwards, reeling. He felt like a wooden toy on the end of a string spinning up and down in a pattern outside his control. "I, I-? I _won?!_ "

Majora moved to stand. In their lap was a wrapped white cloth. They held it up for him to take. "Yes," they said. "It's frustrating. You've won every round so far. It's frustrating, but," they tilted their head, "that's what makes it fun."

He cradled his skull in disbelief and puzzled over the cloth. He reached out a cautious, curious hand, but Tatl darted in front of him and beat it away.

"It's a trick!" she cried.

"No," said Majora. "It's so you can play. There's no point in any of this if you don't play."

The cloth was the same plain white as Majora's shirt; the same plain white as the clothing on the other masked children. It draped over whatever lay beneath like a funeral shroud.

"You're a demon!" said Tatl. "Nothing you say can be trusted!"

Majora ignored her. "This is just for you. No one else. But you have to take it."

The tree sent down a handful of leaves as the earth trembled.

He had no more masks, no more time, no more options besides imminent death or whatever lay shrouded in the cloth. It might be something even worse than death. There was no way to know. He could either risk it, or accept the known, absolute loss. His head spun and his heart pounded like a beaten drum without a clear rhythm. The argumentative _take it or leave it_ bouncing back and forth inside of it rocked him like a boat on the verge of capsizing. _Take it, leave it, take it, leave it._ Each percussive strike sent spots bleeding over his vision.

He took it.

The white shroud fluttered to the ground and left him staring face-to-face with himself, seven years older. The skin and hair was a disturbing ghostly white, and the red and blue smears cutting down over the forehead and cheeks spoke of Ikana, but the resemblance was unmistakable. His face turned color to match it in appearance even more closely.

A dark intensity emanated from the mask's empty, cut out eyes. Himself, warped into an adult, again.

"What is this?" he asked, voice low and flat.

"Are you ready?" asked Majora.

" _What is this?!_ " he hissed, his whole body straining from a pressure running from the veins in his neck to the tendons in his arm.

Majora could have been smiling. "You're the bad guy," they said. "And when you're bad, you just run. That's fine, right?"

" _What is this mask?!_ " he roared.

"Shall we play?" Majora asked, like they had left any other option.

The field shuddered underfoot. Its green tapestry rippled like disturbed water, and then stilled into a pentagonal room of thick, stained opalescent glass held together by patinated gold seams. Within four of them hung the masks of the four creatures from the four worlds, arranged so their eyes fell upon the tree bursting from the floor in front of the fifth wall. Except, there was no tree anymore. In its place rose the form of a stylized sun, and an altar of bloodstained green granite rose where the lily once bloomed. At the sun's center, a black stone disk etched with a chalk-white design housed Majora's Mask.

The altar. The lily. Death. What died on the hill to feed the tree, to feed Majora? How many sacrifices lay beneath his feet?

Only Majora knew. They broke from the wall and hovered before him.

He reached for his sword. It was gone. He'd thrust it into the ground in a fit of rage, and it had not come with him.

His bow. He reached for his bow and the arrows of light, but found his quiver empty. In fact, he was naked but for his green tunic and the white mask in his hands.

Majora's Mask grew in size, and then cracked along the outlines of the paint blocking out its face like it held inside of itself something expanding at too fast a rate to contain. A dozen long, fleshy strips of bloody muscle dripped out from the back of the mask and hit the floor with a slow, wet splat.

"What _is_ that?!" Tatl cried, her horror echoing off the five walls. "Does this thing actually-?!"

One of the muscle strips lashed out from its back and reached for Tatl. She zipped out of its reach and cowered behind her companion.

"It's a _living creature!_ It doesn't have a host, so it's _becoming_ a living creature!" she screamed, horrified.

Majora's limp flesh twitched once, as a stringy mass, and then slowly wrapped themselves together into something stronger. Pulsing ligaments bulged between the mask's seams as it flexed and expanded in uneven, unnatural directions. With each shuddering twitch, more and more strips of flesh splattered from the mask's center like a snail unfurling from its shell, and layered over one another until they formed a raw, boneless set of arms and legs trailing behind the mask like bloody strips of fabric.

He backed up a few more steps, and whirled around with a start when he made contact with something sharp. Gyorg's Mask floated in the air behind him, and at his flank lurked the other three. A cruel glimmer lit their eyes from the inside as they closed in around him.

The four creature masks were here, but where were _his_ masks? Where were Darmani and Mikau? Where was the Deku child?! He gnashed his teeth, and let his terror shrink behind a deep, shrouding anger. The white mask fell to his feet.

He kicked Odolwa's Mask away and grabbed Gyorg's by the teeth. It struggled and tried to gore him with its horn, but with a mighty grunt, he redirected its strike to skewer Twinmold's lower right eye. It ran it through to the back of the mask, and with a final, pained screeched and shudder, it fell to the ground. Congealed ooze wept from the wound as the rest of the mask burned away into a fine mist.

" _Give me back what you took!_ " he roared, spinning Gyorg's Mask around and bashing it into the ground so the horn splintered in two, and then until the faceplate was a flat sheet on the ground. " _Give them_ _back!"_

Tatl screeched as Goht charged him next. He rolled to the other side of it, and Odolwa took both horns through the back. He was upon both of them an instant later, with the shard of Gyorg's horn digging into his hand.

He screamed and jammed the horn in and out of the circuits behind Goht's eyes. Slick brown oil and blue coolant squirted from the holes with a series of popping, snarling sparks until the horn burned away into nothing from in his hand. Goht's Mask fell to the ground on top of a shuddering Odolwa, and they both disintegrated into nothing but mist.

He let loose a bloodcurdling scream and turned on Majora, only to find Majora had come to meet him first. They towered over him no longer as a mask, but a monster.

The pulsing web of flesh trailing behind the mask had grown, thickened, and stiffened, like Majora jammed a core of bone through the center of its limp limbs to give them form and foundation, and then covered them in rough, unnaturally-colored skin. The stretched mask erupted like a torso from a fully-formed lower body. One eye glared from the center of each breast, and their red-outlined outer corners led into two veined, bulging arms and clenched fists. Between the mask's two crowning yellow horns, a rising lump of green-veined flesh supported one enormous, horned eyeball. It lolled left and right, unsupported, until its quivering meat pedestal ruptured and a new, white, malformed skull with needle-like teeth cradled it like the central jewel in a macabre crown. The dilated pupil surrounded and devoured their prey's reflection as their enormous, grotesque body leaned down to look him in the eye.

Then, Majora opened their terrible mouth and let loose a high-pitched, overwhelmingly brutal scream. It pierced his skull like hot needles driving through soft butter.

He welded his palms to his ears and called for Tatl, but the next thing he knew, a searing, stinging pain cracked over his entire torso and made him see white. He fell flat on his back and then rolled the other way, stunned and choking.

Majora laughed. Sliding out from the center of its gashed palms were two slick, bloody whips of muscle. One of them sloughed off a strip of green fabric as it made its return arc across the room.

Tatl gleamed above his head, manic.

"Hey! _Hey!_ " She screamed.

She was pointing at something. He turned his head. The white mask lay on the floor not far from him.

Tatl picked it up by its white hair and dragged it to him. Its edge skated across the glass floor like the foot of a crane dragging across water.

"Monster," he muttered.

"Put it on!" she cried, delivering it into his hands.

Majora cracked the second whip. It fell across his back like a ribbon of fire, and forced a sickening heave of pain from his body. He dropped the white mask, and then curled his body around it to brace himself for the next strike.

Majora obliged. He screamed. Majora struck him again. And again.

And again.

"What are you doing?!" Tatl's screams echoed off the walls with a distant ring. "That thing will _kill_ you! Majora will-!"

His wounds howled in agony as something heavy and as large as he was pressed into his back and flipped him over. The spots in his vision erupted anew like black clouds dissolving away the sky. Something wet and sticky ran over his body and glued his browning, shredded clothes to his ruined skin.

Majora's three eyes stared down at him. The one on their crown blinked, curious.

Why not wear the white mask?

The white mask was full of darkness. A monster. That's what it was. He could feel it from the moment he touched its pale surface. The space where its eyes should have been recognized within him with an overwhelming malice, and a need to exercise it. He would become like that man, that warlock, that thief, and lose his soul to the machinations of his desires made manifest.

But without his tools, without their support, he had nothing. He could not save Termina, or Clock Town. He was nothing to this demon, except the bearer of the white mask. They made a deal, and what Majora gave, they could not take back.

He brought the mask to his face with weak, trembling hands, and then feebly dropped it. Majora tilted their head again, and then kneeled to peer at him through his fading vision. Their bloody whips retracted into their hands like a slimy line on a reel, and they reached out a clawed hand to him.

A shower of light beat it back. Tatl.

"No!" she cried. "No! You won't touch this child! You wo-!"

Majora pushed her aside, unconcerned, and picked up the white mask still clutched in his hands.

Tears slipped down his cheeks, and his ribs screamed with subdued sobs. He cursed his powerlessness, and his weak heart. He cursed his hubris in trusting, even for a second, the four masked children, and thinking that his efforts might be enough to stop the fate of these four worlds. He cursed himself for refusing the white mask, because now, it was too late.

He struggled one last time to take it back.

He struggled, and Majora obliged. The demon guided the mask over his face with a steady hand, and then let him finish carrying it the short distance from the air to his face.

Power flowed through his veins. Power, and pain. His mouth opened in a silent scream as the mask sent his body seizing into an arc as his spine, his arms, his legs, his chest expanded and grew beyond his age, beyond the limitations of his flesh. White light pulsed from the bloody seams ripped in his skin and clothed him, and his heart might as well have been burning at the center of the sun for all it pained him. He brought his hands to his chest, and the handle of a long, helix-shaped sword rose to meet it from within his body like he was the sheath to some invisible, unspeakable weapon only now allowed to take shape. It grew and grew until it was as long as his twisted body, glowing icy white along both sides of the blade. The moment the tip finally separated from his chest, his vision descended into a pit of light and fire.

Anger. Deep anger. Fire. The powers once beyond him had tied his hands and buried him beneath a tomb of naive kindnesses and leeched his happiness from him like insects burrowing in a corpse, but now, he was free. He was free! The uncontrollable white fire burning through his insides turned his restraints to cinders and melted his headstone into a throne of sparkling glass. He had been helpless all his life, but now, he would _never be helpless again!_

In the near distance, a scream. Across his face, something like blood. In his eyes, fire.

White fire.

Damn this demon. Damn this world! Damn everything! No one would hurt him again, because he would cleanse this world in searing, unforgiving flames. No one in the world would ever hurt him again, _ever_ , because he would turn them into ash, and engulf the ground they walked on! He would kill them! He would _destroy_ them! He would punish them, wickedly, for the way they wickedly tormented him! His heart was a mirror, and his blade a cruel light reflecting from it to burn humanity like a glass pane burning alive a colony of _ants!_ Insects! The people of the world were nothing but ants, and the world a pile of dirt! Why did they exist? _Why did they exist?!_ He hated them! He _hated_ them! _He hated them!_ His name was fury, and he hated them! His name was wrath, and they wronged him! His name was vengeance, and he-!

"That isn't your name," interrupted a voice. It was small, and it was weak, but it wasn't timid.

He turned around. The room darkened, and a tiny Deku child stared up at him with big, mournful amber eyes. It grew no leaves beyond the two sprouting from the branch on the top of its head.

"That isn't your name," he repeated.

"What do _you_ care?!" he growled.

"I didn't trust my soul with someone so cruel," the child said. "Someone like you, I'd never let leave my body. I'd never have released you from the curse I became, if you were someone like that."

"What are you to me?! I'll burn you!" he yelled, and sent tongues of white flame after the Deku child's wooden frame. "Worthless creature- you're only kindling!"

"Yes," said the child, his face framed by and blackening from the stripes of fire clawing at his body. "I am only wood. My flesh is weak, and my time on earth already over. But I won't tremble in front of you. I'll never tremble in front of you. I am better than that."

"You are better than that, too." Another voice, this one deep and full like an echo arising from a cavern deep within the earth, spoke from a figure emerging from the darkness.

Darmani's body dwarfed the Deku child at his heels. So did Mikau's limber frame, though not as much.

His silky-sandy voice held an edge. "We didn't choose you because you were mighty, or terrible, or full of hate. Anyone can be that. Anyone. That's so uncool. That's like Evan's writing on his worst days." Mikau flipped one of the fins framing his face over his shoulder. "Evan's usually a great writer, but that's not a compliment, by the way."

"You didn't _chose_ me at all," he said. "You _needed_ me."

"And you needed us, little one," said Darmani. "I told you. I offered you everything. Everything! But someone else's happiness and help cannot fulfill you. Someone else's power cannot complete you. It can only help you, or it can hurt you. You have to make that decision yourself."

"Why?!" he said. "What do my decisions have to do with it?! When you get sick, you don't _decide_ to get better! When you break your arm, you don't _decide_ that it heals! When someone leaves you, you don't _decide_ how it makes you feel!"

"But you decide what you will do next," the Deku child said. "You decide if you will lash out forever, or if you will let yourself let it go. _You_ decide that. You don't decide the past, but you _do_ decide the future."

"'If we weren't unhappy sometimes, then we never could be happy. You have to have both for the other to be true,'" said Mikau. "Remember?"

A wave of fire and light bloomed beneath his feet and spread over the ground with an unbridled fury. Darmani stepped forward and shielded Mikau and the Deku child with his scarred body until it subsided.

"How can I decide so much when so much has been decided for me?!" he cried. "How do I forgive so much when so much has been taken from me? How do I _not_ regret so many things I can never _fix?_ "

"How did she?" the Deku child asked, circling around Darmani's leg to stand in front of him.

"Who?"

"She. The girl. The princess Zelda."

He growled, anger renewed like a flame on a turned log. "Zelda?! What does she have to forgive _me_ for?!"

"You left," the Deku child said.

He swallowed. A pressure in his head beat from his skull like a drum. "What do I care if that hurts her?"

"I'm not asking if you want to see her again, or even saying that you should," said the Deku child. "I'm only asking how she forgave you. I saw your memories. She was praying for you. She was wishing you well. How? Why? It isn't impossible." He shook his head. The leaves on it swayed with it. "It isn't impossible to forgive the people who hurt you. I'm sure others have, too."

A wall of searing light erupted from the tip of his blade as he slashed it across the air. "How dare you speak to me like this, you whelp! Do you know who I _am?!_ Do you know what I have _done?!_ "

"Yes, I know," the Deku child said, unafraid, and spread his tiny wooden palms out behind him. "And they know."

In the space behind him, a series of ethereal figures appeared, each with their masks.

Aroma in her son's mask. The Curiosity Shop owner in the Keaton Mask, and Kafei and Anju on either side of the Couple's Mask with the rest of their families and Cremia by their shoulders. Her sister held her bow in one hand and Romani's Mask in the other. On the Postman's head was his red hat, and the Bunny Hood's long ears swayed above Grog's bald head. Gorman stood with his brothers behind a comically weeping copy of their own faces, and his troop danced and sang in a circle, trading the Bremen Mask and Kamaro's Mask between them. Pamela and her father held the Gibdo mask, framed by a swath of Ikana's saluting undead soldiers and a dressed Skull Keeta behind them. The Garo at their side had no bodies, but their mask and the Giant's Mask stood in for them while the frogs from the mountain smithy hopped around Don Gero's immortalized figure. The Deku Butler's excellent foliage proudly crowned the Mask of Scents. The Great Fairy, the Bomb Shop woman, Shiro, and Granny in the All Night Mask. All of them were there, including the Happy Mask Salesman holding the Mask of Truth. Their bodies flickered like candles in the darkness.

"The people they represent might not remember, come morning, but will you really destroy them? Just because you hurt?" asked Mikau. At his side stood Lulu and the rest of his band, and behind Darmani was his tribe. "Is that what you want?"

"Who are they to me?" he asked, shrinking. His heart felt like a shaking, cracking vessel spilling water with each new leak. The fire crowning his body hissed and fizzled with quivering uncertainty.

"I don't know," said the Deku child. "And you won't know. That's up to you. But who are you to _you_? Who do you want to be? Someone who forgives and grows at their own pace, or someone warped into something they never should have been?"

"I," he said, stuttering.

He loved Termina. He loved the control and the certainty of holding its time in his hands and letting it run like sand through his fingers at his own pace not from a sense of self-importance, but because it meant he never had to say goodbye, and never had to live with the permanence of it. He loved this world, and all its people. He loved them so much that he climbed the Clock Tower for them even though he knew he might never come down. He loved them so much, he made it his mission to not leave them until he made them a better world.

"So you want to be remembered as the Fierce Deity?"

"No," he said, tearing up. "No, my name is… my name has always been-!"

" _Chiaru!_ " screamed Tatl. Her voice blasted through the room like a firework in his face, and the apparitions of his masks disappeared like shadows in sunlight. "Stop!"

The white mask clattered to his feet with a series of sloppy, clopping thuds. Around him, the pentagonal room spread out in shattered ruins. Charred limbs and burning shrapnel scattered around him, but Majora's Mask was nowhere to be found. Tatl herself was curled in a ball in front of him, with her arms over her head like a shield. He stared at her, eyes wide and bewildered.

Her exhausted voice cracked over a sob.

"It's over," she said. "You can _stop_. You can finally stop."

He took a trembling, choking breath, and collapsed.

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

Author's Note: Thank you, everyone, so much for being with me for this story. I have had so much fun reading your comments and discussing this with you. I will add a short epilogue to this, but if you played the game, you already know how it ends. Again, thank you, thank you, thank you!


	33. Happy Mask Salesman

Four months. Chiaru opened his eyes in Hyrule's past as the kingdom's most powerful prophet, and stayed four months after the thief king's yellow eyes found him through Zelda's window. Never in his life had he spent so much time indoors, and never under so much supervision. Between Zelda and her tutors, and the hard, distant eyes of the king, he was always in the dreaded company of claustrophobia or his own quiet paranoia. He endured it with a fragile optimism that, when the Gerudo king finally died, he might wake up from this like he woke up from so many dreams involving both princess and thief from his life before.

Ganondorf's trial came and went, and his execution carried out, but Chiaru never opened his eyes from this new forever. Instead, he dreamed himself free under the cover of dark trees by night, and by day wandered the town streets like a dog too smart to fight his leash lest Zelda reign him in.

On an afternoon full of grass whistles and pensive anger at a month lost in this strange past, Epona poked her head out from an alley of town and ate his crafted instrument out of his hands. She followed him through the street, through the market, and then to the castle gates despite his panicked attempts to shoo her away.

If Malon had brought her to the market with the intent of socializing her, it backfired. Zelda insisted they treat the filly like royalty and showered her in nothing but kindnesses, but Epona's trepidation and vehement refusals to any handler but Chiaru overwhelmed her. To a gentle hand, Epona shied away. In the face of a kind word, she bucked. Her own shadow spooked her. She accepted Chiaru and Chiaru alone, and their relationship to one another prevented Zelda from ever coming close to either of them the same way two obstinate doors of a metal gate lock out trespassers and well-meaning neighbors alike.

"The two of you are very similar," Zelda admitted, in a rare moment of frustration. "Always keeping to yourselves, and full of unreasonable fear."

Only the birds and the castle guards should have been out and about now, but Zelda's discipline remained even without Impa. Even at this hour, her hair was pulled into a neat bun beneath her silken hat, and the embroidered gold and red emblem of her family on the over skirt of her pink and white dress swayed with each step she took over the castle's hilltop lawn. Chiaru stood on the far side of the lawn fully dressed in his green tunic, with sword and shield strapped to his back. No emblem adorned the sword, and the shield favored no house- only a red bird tangled in its own wings blanketed over where the royal emblem might be. Epona snuffled at his side, a pack on her back.

"You and the Gerudo king are also very similar," he replied, in a rare moment of open distrust. She was the last person he wanted to witness him leaving. She might stop him by royal decree, or with a magic song, or any number of other tricks. "Shield eaters and world leaders have many likes alike."

Zelda's fair face set her mouth into an aghast circle beneath her dainty nose, and then wrinkled it into a watery frown. The manicured grass on the castle lawn tugged at the pink and white silks of her dress in quiet concern.

He scrunched his face together like a scrapped piece of paper scribbled with bad ideas, and tossed it over his shoulder. Epona snorted and nuzzled his forehead.

"That was uncalled for," he admitted, patting Epona's nose.

"Yes," Zelda said. "It was."

She squeezed whatever it was she held in her hands, and stared at the grass. The dew spread in an even blanket over it, and the sun glazed it with a crisp silver sheen. The birds scattered in the few sculpted trees chittered and tweeted songs of peaceful days while the green-tipped spires of the white stone castle rose into the sky behind them and adopted the colors of the sunrise.

She sighed, defeated. "You are unhappy here, aren't you?"

He stopped petting Epona, and looked out over the kingdom peering up at him from the base of the hill unrolling at his feet. Grey cobblestone and red tile roofs outlined the capital and the lives of its citizens, and beyond its perimeter spread the open fields until they hit the borders of parts unknown. Hyrule appeared a kingdom of picture-perfect toys from the top of the hill, or like sugar figurines made to top the enormous cakes he sometimes saw in the window of the town's bakery. It was perfect and full, and he was malformed and rotten in its presence.

"What have we done to make you feel this way?" Zelda asked. "You have saved our kingdom and left us in a debt I cannot imagine we will ever repay, but I cannot understand what we might have done to leave you so displeased. Is it something my father has done? That I have done?"

"No," he said.

"Then what is it? What hurts you so?"

Chiaru gave Epona another thoughtful stroke down her muzzle.

"You have been nothing but gracious," he said. "You welcomed me into your home with open arms and accepted my council these past months, and for that I should be nothing but grateful." He caught her out of the corner of his eye. "But I don't have it within me."

Zelda's clenched fists gathered at her chest, like whatever they held was her heart.

"Before I came here, I had a companion," he said.

"The fairy, Navi," said Zelda. "You told me."

"She left me without saying goodbye. Do you know why?"

Zelda shook her head.

"Neither did I." Chiaru moved to face her. "But I think I might, since knowing you."

Zelda turned her back. The ends of her hat quivered like leaves in the breeze.

"You are already leaving this land of Hyrule, aren't you?" she asked.

He sighed, like her implied permission lifted the weight of seven years from his chest and let him breathe deeply for the first time since he met any version of her.

"You've done nothing wrong," he said. "Nothing at all. You should know that. And as you were, you never meant to do any harm to anyone. That is the truth. But I," he shook his head, "I am not obligated to be with you anymore. Now that my adventure is over, you are a reminder of the things I would rather forget. I don't belong here, and I never did."

Zelda's shoulders trembled as her composure shattered.

The birds sang over one another on the lawn, and the sun brought new and beautiful color to the roofs of the town below. Zelda grew still, like an animal in its death throes struck down by a spear hurled in mercy, or a little girl silenced by the cruel revelation that being queen meant being alone.

"Even though it was only a short time, I feel like I've known you forever," she said, finally. Her voice warbled with a quivering edge. "I'll never forget the days we spent together in Hyrule."

Chiaru pressed his eyelids shut with a long sigh. When he opened them again, he found Zelda staring at him with obstinate blue eyes and a resolute frown.

"And I believe in my heart that," she sucked in a breath, "a day will come when I shall meet you again."

Zelda's clenched fists opened to reveal the blue ocarina. Sunlight ran from its shimmering surface like water. She held it out to him.

"Until that day comes, please take this."

He refused her.

She refused to let him. "I am praying," she said. "I am praying that your journey be a safe one. If something should happen to you, remember," her expression crumbled like a dam holding back too much, "remember…!" She buckled beneath the pressure.

"Goodbye," he said.

He took the ocarina and mounted Epona with one quick, practiced motion. When he gently clicked his tongue to move onwards, she obeyed, and Zelda watched him go towards the castle gate with eyes both empty and full at the same time. Her hands clutched over her chest like the ocarina was still there.

Chiaru looked to the guard manning the gate. The man's helmet obscured his eyes, but the uncomfortable squiggle of his lips proved him guilty of eavesdropping as he glanced from Chiaru to Zelda. In an erased past, Chiaru gave him money to let him pass in the opposite direction, and he was prepared to do it again, if he had to.

"Don't make me bribe you in front of your princess," he said. "Please let me through."

The guard looked between the two children one more time, and after a panicked gulp, turned the gate crank high enough to let Epona and Chiaru pass. It closed behind them with an earthen thud.

Fretful footsteps thudded not far behind. Zelda threw herself at the gate.

"The goddess of Time is protecting you!" she called. "If you play, she will aid you! If you play, she...!"

The distance between them grew and grew, and with it, so did the silence. The path through the town below was quiet, and in the early morning, so were the people rising from their beds. The fountain in the center of the market square burbled and bubbled with oblivious cheer in the shadow of the Temple of Time, unaware of what could have been. He passed by the clean, bright shops and quaint sidestreets, nodded to the handful of beggars loitering beneath the thoroughfare's overhangs, and crossed over the drawbridge into the field as the first traveler of the day.

The path through Hyrule field carved a clear line through the grass, but none of its destinations were the one for him. His path was his choice, and it unfurled before him in an infinite number of directions. He set Epona on a course north, and let her run.

And with that, he was free. Free, and terrified. Up until this moment, his learned influence from the future guided his hand for every decision, but that future was no more. It was almost too much.

Grass flew up around his and Epona's ankles, and the risen sun warmed her fur. She nickered, proud, and ran until she decided to canter, and then trot, and then stop for a snack. Chiaru dismounted and gave it to her with a wry smile, and then a generous amount of water to stave off the mounting sun.

He looked around. They had long since left behind any known trails. The field was peaceful, empty, and oppressive in its scope the same way a wasteland without water bore down on lost souls parched by thirst and overwhelmed without directions. A niggling regret tugged at his heart, at his throat. He swallowed.

When she finished her carrot, Epona trotted to his shoulder and looked around with him, her ears rotating in curious circles and deep brown eyes sparkling with interest at a place she had never seen before: a deep green swath of trees overtaking the horizon at the edge of the field. A sudden wind sent their leaves quivering in the wind and made them appear a hazy, emerald shroud blanketing over the secrets at the end of the world.

The Woods. At their heart was a familiar place. At their heart was his home. Home, and Navi.

Navi. The thought of her crashed into him the way a storm crashes into a mountainside. What would he say when he found her? What would he say to Zelda if she suddenly found him after he chose to leave her?

Chiaru didn't know, but he might be forced to find out if he did not make a decision soon. Zelda could come rising over that hill any minute with an army of guards. She could change her mind and order him back to the castle, and he would be all but powerless to resist.

His thoughts swirled like ash on the wind, his head pounded like thunder in the clouds, and the cool glaze of the blue ocarina smarted against his chest like singed earth in the wake of a lightning strike. The sun above him could not have been any brighter, but the swelling heat of midday fell on him like a cruel rain of white-hot arrows.

Then, a cool, whistling wind breezed overhead, and the branches of The Woods waved like hands beckoning them into their shade.

The Woods existed since time immemorial and would exist until the river ran dry. They lived not as a collection of trees and brush, but a single entity. Their thin, invisible fingers stretched through the roots in the ground like a single, massive glove, and their eyes peered through every knothole of every tree, every divot in every pebble on the ground, and every ripple in every puddle of water. Their pulse was the sparking flicker of effervescent light stringing through the air, and their breath the deep mist gently falling between the trees.

He mounted Epona and urged her towards them. She grunted in trepidation.

"It's alright," he said.

Saria lead him through these Woods since his memory began. He knew them as well as any creature could hope. With a click of his tongue, he nudged Epona onwards, beneath the branches and towards the old suspension bridge connecting the Kokiri Forest Meadow to the rest of Hyrule.

Epona snorted, but trusted him enough to enter.

The trees spread overlapping shadows about the ground like a net woven from darkness. Each strand bunched thicker and thicker knots until the darkness blocked out the sun and enveloped Chiaru and Epona whole. Chiaru turned his head towards the entrance out of curiosity, but discovered nothing but brush and branches. He turned back around.

Softly swirling fog and spiraling tendrils of gossamer light poured over the ground, over the leaves, and around the trees in a cascading, piling gauze ribbon with no beginning and no end. Epona swam through it with soft, reverent strides while Chiaru's eyes cut it with a wary edge. They pierced only the shallowest level: the trees surrounding him grew up from the ground like the columns of a temple unfathomable in size and unknowable in divinity.

The soft clip of Epona's hooves slowed to a gentle halt.

He breathed in. Each cautious sip formed moist, cool pools of mist into his lungs. With each breath out, the air churned like a ghostly soup stirring together all things old and dead with all things new and alive into one cohesive being. The wet of the dirt and grass blossomed in Chiaru's nose and stuck while the slow, sweet decline of rot and the harsh, pungent run of crystallizing sap plagued the trees in equal measure.

For all the mysteries The Woods were, they had never appeared to him so grandiose and so still before. They always walked him through their branches in the form of a maze, or a series of rooms, or a puzzle, or a winding tunnel obscuring a larger whole. Never had he been taken by the hand and lead in a straight line to their heart, and never had he walked through them without falling gently into the hands of the Kokiri Forest Meadow first.

He swallowed a mouthful of nervous thirst as the disbelief settled like silt in the bottom of his soul. He was lost in a way he never imagined he could be.

No life existed within The Woods without their permission, and death claimed nothing the Woods did not want it to. They arranged themselves into whatever labyrinth they wanted, and if they did not want someone or something to leave, they never would.

He crushed his eyelids together, and mashed his lips between his teeth.

Stalfos, Stalfos. Everyone, Stalfos. What The Woods did to unworthy trespassers, the Kokiri mimicked in games and stories. Those were the lyrics the Kokiri sang to one another in the dark and the trees when they played hide-and-go-seek. Those were the lyrics they sang when they played the role of a Stalfos intent on stripping the flesh of intruders and turning them into Stalfos, too.

His heart thudded in his ears. Was he unworthy? Was he unwanted? Were The Woods rejecting him? Were they drawing him and Epona deeper to twist them into skeletal soldiers?

A denial from The Woods was tantamount to a denial from Saria. The Woods were of Saria as much as she was of them. Had it not been so, they would have eaten her alive rather than let her act on their behalf in the eyes of the goddesses. But had The Woods forgotten Saria? Had The Woods forgotten everything, too?! Was he really alone?!

Oh, he was a fool to come here!

The Woods spared lost children the fate of a Stalfos by reincarnating them as a wooden skullkid, but he had been twisted and forced into the frame of an adult by powers beyond his means. Though they were gone, Darunia had recognized him as a real man, and Ruto had thought it suited him. And Navi, she-!

Navi.

How could he have been so stupid?! He needed the guidance of a fairy to find the forest meadow, and she had left him like a paper bird on a windy day! The one reason he was allowed passage into The Woods had sloughed off like gold paint off a fake coin! How could he have been so naive?! Chiaru sucked in another breath and looked behind him.

If The Woods had any reason to keep him here as he was, it was surely because they meant to mold him into the nameless, faceless monster that he always knew he would-!

Epona screamed in sudden terror, and threw Chiaru to the ground.

His head swam with visions of faces and faces and faces. A yellow-eyed mask wearing the body of someone he used to know robbed him of the ocarina, and then Epona, and then of the self. They lead him to a tunnel bridging the Woods and the end of the world, and then left him behind with one of the fairies. They left him behind with Tatl, who pried his name from him when he doubted it was even his to give anymore. They left him with Tatl, who lead him through the darkness for three whole days. They left him with Tatl, who never let him forget.

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

Four Giants stood beneath a clear blue sky, arms outstretched to behold a rainbow arching above their heads, above Clock Town, above all four worlds of Termina. The promise the seven colors told spanned just as wide, just as far, and just as vividly: today was new, today was bright, and today was the beginning of a new future. Today was the dawn of a new day.

Chiaru's heavy eyelids opened to it with a slow disbelief. Tatl and Tael bobbed above his head in complementary colors like a set of mismatched eyeballs boggling out of the calm sky behind them. A high-pitched whinny nearby egged them closer.

"He's awake," said Tatl.

Epona's snout blocked the two of them out, and licked him. It left a chilled, wet stripe over his face. He sat up with agonizing effort.

The southern clearing of Termina field sprawled around him with the light of the rising sun. The risen, wooden pathways and old stumps barely hid the faces of the handful of bewildered Clock Town citizens ogling the Four Giants in awe. Sonny's mother had a pair of binoculars strapped to her face to see them more clearly.

Chiaru brought a shaky hand to his skull and shook out the latent fog from his mind, and then noticed the skullkid hunching next to him. His round eyes stared up at the Four Giants with tacky, sappy tears oozing at their corners.

The Four Giants stared back at him. Their dewy eyes swirled with clouds of sadness.

"You guys," sniveled the skullkid, "you hadn't forgotten about me?"

The Giants hummed a low note.

The skullkid's stiff arms rattled. His head hung so low that the bright red raffia on the brim of his hat blocked out his eyes and obscured his beak. From this angle, he was nothing but a trembling scarecrow shaken by the wind. Anything stronger, and he might fall apart in a fluttering pile of sticks and straw.

"You still thought of me as a friend?" he asked. The pitch of his voice twisted up at the ends like his throat was a wet cloth wrung too tightly in his fingers.

Tatl and Tael hurried to him with cautious, uncertain hands, and nothing to say.

Neither did the Giants, until the Giant of the South threw back their great head and released an echoing refrain of the Oath to Order. It washed through the ears of Termina like a wave rolling over the dry shore.

The Giants were older than words. They spoke in the song of the earth and elements; in the language of this world's creation. Chiaru could not put specific translations on their will, but he could understand their visceral regret and deep forgiveness with greater clarity than if it had come from within him. He looked at the skullkid's trembling body, and felt the last of his anger's teeth rot away into nothing. They were alike. They had always been just alike. All they wanted was to be remembered.

Tatl turned over her shoulder towards Chiaru with curious concern in her eyes, but he deep pity for the child blooming over his face answered whatever questions she had. She turned again to console the skullkid.

The Giant of the South finished their chorus, and after one more long look towards the skullkid, took a gentle step over his head, and Chiaru's head, and the heads of all the citizens of Clock Town gaping in the open field, and began the trek towards Woodfall. The other three Giants turned their backs to Clock Town in their cardinal directions, too, and with careful progress, began their one-hundred step journey back to their chosen worlds.

On their way, the Giant of the North took up the Oath. It echoed from the mountaintops and shook the last of the ice from the feet of Snowhead. Next came the voice of the Giant of the West, and the ocean's tumultuous currents calmed in reverence at the sound. The voice of the Giant of the East rejoiced with the new life reaching from Ikana's scarred, dried earth, and with the lives left standing just below where the moon hungrily hung not half an hour before.

On their last note, the four disappeared into the clay beneath their feet, but Termina had not, and would not. The skullkid wept, and so did Chiaru, but not out of sadness. He wept because the land was beautiful, and because it would live.

All of his anger, all of his grief- none of it justified punishing the rest of the world just to bring some kind of consolation to himself. His feelings were his own, and they were his right to experience, but the people he met had no responsibility to endure them. Whatever he felt, it was his challenge to grow past it or put it away. Zelda meant him no harm, and she invited his return. Navi meant him no harm, but her path diverted from his. Those decisions were his to respect, not mar with unaddressed anger. The Woods may have forgotten him, but that was no reason to let it stay that way.

His days were hard, and the storm inside himself would never be gone for good, but it did not have to rage forever, and he did not need to build his life around it. The times change. People change. Feelings change. Time flowed on. It was everyone's right, and his right, to let that happen.

He did not have to decide whether to return to Zelda today, or ever, but the possibility of returning- the possibilities of the future- were not something to fear. If he could find it in himself to forgive the days prior for all their hardships, he could finally see today for what it was.

A reedy voice interjected in his thoughts. "Did you… did you save me?"

He turned away from whatever point in the sky had grabbed his attention, and turned towards the skullkid. His wooden face had dried now, and his perfectly round amber eyes curiously roved over Chiaru from above his yellow beak.

He gestured to the distance. "No, but I called them, and they did."

The skullkid looked over his shoulder- to the swamp, but the direction was totally arbitrary.

"I thought they didn't want to be friends with me. But," he tilted his head, "they hadn't forgotten about me. Friends are a nice thing to have." The skullkid jittered with a high-pitched chuckle. "Could you be my friend, too?"

He grinned despite himself. "Of course."

The skullkid grinned and hurried over with a jostled walk like a puppet jerking its strings from its wearer with a burst of free will. He sniffed at Chiaru like a dog inspecting another dog, and thoughtfully pursed his beak.

Then, he said, "You have the same smell as the fairy kid who taught me that song in The Woods."

He balked. "I, I, I you, uh, I what?"

Chiaru's eyes flew open and he took a step back to brace himself. The fairy kid who taught the skullkid that song in The Woods could only be one person: himself, in another context. If the skullkid remembered him, then The Woods remembered him, and if The Woods remembered him, he had been led here on purpose. Chiaru had been fooled this whole journey.

"You knew who I was this whole time?!"

The skullkid laughed in his face.

Tatl slapped a mouth over a disbelieving guffaw. Chiaru felt his face turn red and his stomach churn in circles. He wasn't sure if he should be angry or delighted, or keep standing still and looking an idiot in an open field. He decided on all of them at once.

The skullkid paid it no mind. He snapped his wooden fingers and fidgeted. "I know! I know! We can-!"

The Salesman appeared behind both of them where a moment ago there was only open field. His ostentatious clothing and oversized pack appeared almost natural in the open light of day, and the multicolored designs on the mask clutched in his hands were nothing but paint on wood. Majora's Mask's eyes failed to glow with any malice. They failed to glow at all. He held it in the air above his head, and positioned it so it appeared where the moon hung in the Four Giants' hands an hour ago.

"So the evil has left the mask after all," mused the Salesman. He turned to Chiaru, smiling. "Well, now. I finally have it back. Since I am in the midst of my travels, I must bid you farewell."

The Salesman bowed low, with his arms flush by his sides, and then strode between Chiaru and the skullkid towards Clock Town.

The skullkid thrust his eyes towards the dirt and balled his hands together in shamed, repentant fists. The Salesman only smiled enigmatically at the distance like a parent who knew scolding their child would be a temper tantrum on their part, and nothing more. The masks on his pack bobbled with each step like a crowd swaying in celebration until he paused at the painted wood steps rising from the deep green field to the Southern Gate.

His neck craned to face Chiaru. "Shouldn't you be returning home as well?"

"Excuse me?"

"Whenever there is a meeting, a parting is sure to follow. However, that parting need not last forever."

Chiaru's guilty eyes searched the grass twenty feet from his shoulder.

"What about you?" he asked. "Will you appear again?"

"Whether a parting be forever or merely for a short time," The Salesman grinned toothily. "That is up to you."

He bowed, again. Chiaru watched with huge eyes, and a thousand questions he wondered if he could even begin to ask the man.

"With that, please excuse me," the Salesman said, instead, and then turned to walk away.

Except he paused, again. His head turned to hang off the side of his pack like yet another mask.

"...But, my, you sure have managed to make quite a number of people happy. "The masks you have are filled with happiness. This is truly a good happiness."

Chiaru instinctively pressed his hands to the inside of his tunic and at the bag hanging from his side. The Deku child's mask grazed his fingertips with coarse and deeply textured grains. He dug deeper in a sudden panic, and realized every mask he surrendered to the children on the moon had returned. Darmani, Mikau, the Mask of Truth- every single one stared up from his bag, as did the strange white mask. He looked to the Salesman, perplexed.

The Salesman only smiled and turned away before disappearing into thin air.

Chiaru bowed. Whatever else he needed to ask, he would do it when they next met.

The tittering of fairy wings pulled him away. Tatl hovered between Chiaru and her brother. She bit her lip and fluttered over to the skullkid's shoulder so she favored neither of them.

"Well, both of us have gotten what we were after," she said.

"Oh?"

"Yes," she said.

"Oh?" he asked, again.

She huffed. Her lip elevated her nose into a decided sneer. "You got your xylophone and your horse and your body back, didn't you? So this is where you and I part ways, isn't it?"

He raised his eyebrows and opened his mouth, but no sound came out.

How do you repay someone who gave you something priceless? That is what he should have asked the Salesman. That is the wisdom Zelda wished she knew.

"You know," Tatl said, swallowing. "It was kind of fun."

He nodded. Stupidly, like a bobble-headed doll with a lump in its throat.

Tatl looked away. "Well, it's almost time for the carnival to begin." She levelled him with her most superior, needling stare. "So why don't you just leave and go about your business? The rest of us have a carnival to go to."

She said it as a challenge, like he should do the opposite. She said it the way a child on the playground entices the other children to want to do what she was doing simply by telling them to do the opposite. He was too old for that to work, and they both knew it.

He smiled and reached out for Epona. She lowered her head and let him mount her with a nonchalant grunt.

Tatl watched, disgusted with herself. Her brother hovered to her side, and the skullkid shuffled to her, too.

Chiaru smiled. "Whenever there is a meeting, a parting is sure to follow," he said. "It's a terrible way to say, 'see you later'. It's so cryptic."

He laughed. It was stupid. It was such a stupid thing to say at the Salesman's expense, but it didn't matter. Chiaru could make comments as mindless as he wanted to, and know that they would not be his last words to Tatl. She and her brother were the skullkid's fairy guardian. She and her brother would always be somewhere near the Lost Woods, and he would always return to the Lost Woods. The wet of the dirt and grass blossomed in Chiaru's nose and stuck while the slow, sweet decline of rot and the harsh, pungent run of crystallizing sap plagued the trees in equal measure. He would find himself lost at many, many points in his life, but whenever he was, he knew he would always find his way again, even when the road grew hard and the obstacles thick and tangled. Someone would remember him when he least expected it if only he honored the journey and the people he met throughout it.

Today was a new day, and he was not afraid of it!

"Thank you," Chiaru said. "Thank you so much."

Tatl sucked in a deep breath, and bit the back of her hand.

"He'll be back," said the skullkid. "Don't worry. He's from The Woods. We all come back. Like the Giants did! See?"

"This isn't the end," Chiaru affirmed. "But I do have to leave, at least for now."

"Why?" Tatl asked.

A big question. He suspected the reason he couldn't put it into words was the same reason the Happy Mask Salesman never gave him a straight answer about anything. For the first time he was both free and unafraid, and though he had traveled far, he still had farther to go before he truly realized what it was he was searching for. He looked at his masks.

"I have," he chuckled, "a job to do. I am a Happiness Salesman, remember?"

"Cryptic," Tatl said. "Always. You always leave me behind like that. I hate it."

"Goodbye," he said.

Tatl shook her head and willed herself not to look at him. She was a glass all but overflowing.

He nudged Epona off with his heels. Grass and sky whizzed by above and beneath them.

A name rang out over the field behind them: "Chiaru!" Tatl cried, wound from wingtip to wingtip as she hurled the name into the world in an echoing reminder for the clay and trees.

"...Thank you," she whispered, like a secret for the wind to carry to his ear whenever he might need a reminder that she, like so many others, were waiting for the day he was ready to return to them as himself, and nothing more.

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

 **Author's Note:** That is the end. Thank you very much for reading. I have appreciated each and every one of you. It makes my day to hear from you, and I hope very much that you have enjoyed Facades.

I realized I forgot to mention it in last chapter's note: our hero's name is Chiaru. It is a naming convention I use. I "name" all the Links to make it easy for me to talk about them and tell them apart. It is nothing more or less than that. :)


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